Poems of Thomas Hardy: A New Selection

by Thomas Hardy, Ned Halley (Introduction)

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Thomas Hardy saw himself, first and foremost, as a poet and he composed poetry throughout his prolific and acclaimed novel-writing years. In 1896, dismayed by the criticism he received on publication of Jude the Obscure, he astonished his worldwide readership by announcing that he would write no more novels. From 1898, until his death in 1928, Hardy published eight volumes of poetry - beginning with Wessex Poems and Other Verses - and this entirely new selection gives us the best from each volume. Now regarded as a bridge between the Victorian era and Modernism, his poetry is lyrical and soul-searching with subjects ranging from the poignant grief at the death of his wife to his experiences of war.

Edited and introduced by Ned Halley.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Radhya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite stanzas from "A Sign-Seeker", which is now one of my all-time favorite poems:

"I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,
The noontides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by."

"I have seen the lightening-blade, the leaping star,
The cauldrons of the sea in storm,
Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.

I learn to prophecy the hid eclipse,
The coming of eccentric orbs;
To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips."

Another favorite was "Midnight on the Great Western"

"Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
This region of sin you find you in,
But are not of?"

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are many who say Hardy's poems are superior to his prose. I'm glad I'm in the minority.

[bimri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hardy did form such sublime poems! Picturesque, potent with emotions and purely lifting in spirit; as much in soul, as in mind.

[Andrew Budden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Hardy made his living as a novelist but his first love was poetry. He is an inspiration to the old, like me, as his finest poems were written in old age when he recalls happier times and lost love.

The three poems I would select from these late poems are:

'The Voice' which ends,

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

'Beeny Cliff' which ends,

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there no more.

The poem I always return to is 'At Castle Boteral',

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunted volume. Haunted with regret over love lost, love mistreated. Hardy is at his best when he combines death with beauty and countryside. The imagery is striking, the verse not flowery in the least. I didn't read this straight through; I needed a break from all of the death and abandonment, no matter how effective the poems were. You might find it useful to skip back and forth through the volume, too, if the intensity of Hardy's loss begins to make the poems tedious.

[Olivia Andrews]

Hardy in awe and often overcome by common people and sentimental places.