Self-taught, Thomas Hardy knew a good deal about English poetry when, in his fifties, he laid the fictions by and returned to his first love. He was an honest craftsman, attending meticulously to what ...

—Thomas Hardy, “The Haunter” few months after Thomas Hardy’s death in 1928, and only weeks before his own, Sir Edmund Gosse recorded on two gramophone discs a memorial for his nearly lifelong friend.

In 1912, when he was 72, Thomas Hardy began to write a series of love poems about his wife, Emma. The poems were unlikely for several reasons. First, for years he and Emma had been estranged, and she ...

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. These are the opening lines of the English poet Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain,” which he wrote for a London benefit ...

The 20th-century poet Philip Larkin is as responsible as anyone for the revival of the poetry of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Hardy is still best known as a novelist, but he thought of himself primarily ...

In the musical Life After, a teenager coping with the loss of her father struggles with the limitations of conventional speech for expressing the complex emotions that surge through the mourning ...

THOMAS HARDY (286 pp.)—Edmund Blunden—Macmillan ($3). HARDY AND THE LADY FROM MADISON SQUARE (264 pp.)—Carl J. Weber—Colby ($5). In the 18903 Thomas Hardy was at the summit of his novelist’s career.