If It's Ever Spring Again: A Choice of Thomas Hardy's Verse

by Thomas Hardy, Tim Atkinson (Editor)

Thomas Hardy is among the most loved English poets. A renowned novelist, he nevertheless wrote poetry throughout his life and returned to it with a passion following the death of his first wife, Emma. His inspiration was rooted in the Dorset countryside and the rural life he knew best although his subjects - life, love, and loss - are universal. His poetry has a directness and simplicity inspired by the ballads and songs of ordinary people and his poetic voice often reflects the rural dialect of his home county. Collected here are some of his best-known and most well-loved verses, including 'Channel Firing', 'To Lizbie Browne', 'The Choirmaster's Burial', 'Drummer Hodge', 'The Darkling Thrush' and many, many more.

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 14, 2020

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.