Hardy’s Poetry: a general survey

Abstract

Hardy always thought of himself as a poet first and foremost. He was not above making disparaging remarks about the fiction which brought him his bread and butter, dismissing it once as a ‘mechanical trade’. He wrote poetry intermittently for seventy years or so although virtually none of it saw print until he was nearly sixty. The Complete Poems contains 947 poems and the late Philip Larkin boldly asserted that it was ‘… many times over the best body of poetic work this century has so far to show’, backing his judgement by including 28, his largest single allocation, in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Dame Helen Gardner, in her New Oxford Book of Verse also chose 22, thereby placing Hardy on a level with the very greatest English poets of the last five centuries. The most recent large conspectual anthology, John Wain’s Oxford Library of English Poetry (1987) gives Hardy similar prominence. There are three complete editions of his verse and more than twenty selections have been made from it. So much cannot be said of any of his contemporaries, or more than a few of his predecessors.

… The characteristic of all great poetry — the general perfectly reduced to the particular. Hardy in conversation with Elliott Felkin in 1919