Selected Poetry

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets. Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century. His verse touches all the common themes of existence : birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death.
If his age brings anything to them, it is an old man's ironic, elegiac sense that hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness. This collection is prepared by Samuel Hynes, editor of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, and selected from the Oxford Authors critical edition. The introduction and notes illuminate Hardy's central place in the tradition of English poetry.
This edition includes : introduction, textual note, bibliography, chronology, explanatory notes, glossary, index.