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Thomas Hardy's Poetry

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hardy's poems, which he prized far above the novels which made him famous and rich, and his ambition to be ranked alongside Shelley and Byron.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Hardy (1840 -1928) and his commitment to poetry, which he prized far above his novels. In the 1890s, once he had earned enough from his fiction, Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and returned to the poetry he had largely put aside since his twenties. He hoped that he might be ranked one day alongside Shelley and Byron, worthy of inclusion in a collection such as Palgrave's Golden Treasury which had inspired him. Hardy kept writing poems for the rest of his life, in different styles and metres, and he explored genres from nature, to war, to epic. Among his best known are what he called his Poems of 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma (1840 -1912), who he credited as the one who had made it possible for him to leave his work as an architect's clerk and to write the novels that made him famous.

With

Mark Ford
Poet, and Professor of English and American Literature, University College London.

Jane Thomas
Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds

And

Tim Armstrong
Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

51 minutes

Last on

Thu 13 Jan 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)

J.O. Baily, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (first published 1970; University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy (first published 1981; Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Donald Davie (ed), Agenda: Thomas Hardy Special Issue (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972)

Mark Ford, Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Thomas Hardy (ed. Tim Armstrong), Selected Poems (Longman, 2009)

Thomas Hardy (ed. James Gibson), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1976)

Thomas Hardy (ed. Thom Gunn), Thomas Hardy: Poems Selected by Tom Paulin (Faber & Faber, 2005)

Samuel Hynes (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy (Oxford University Press, 5 vols., 1982-1995)

David Kennedy, Elegy (Routledge, 2007)

Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester University Press, 2008)

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Tom Paulin, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception (Palgrave Macmillan, 1986)

F.B. Pinion, A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy (first published 1976; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning; The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (The Johns Hopkins University, 1985)

Melanie Sexton, ' Phantoms of his Own Figuring: the Movement Toward Recovery in Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13"' (Victorian Poetry, 29 (3), 1991)

Dennis Taylor, Hardy's Poetry 1860-1928 (2nd edition, Macmillan, 1989)

Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Clarendon Press, 1988)

Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time Torn Man (Viking, 2006)


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  • Thu 13 Jan 2022 09:00
  • Thu 13 Jan 2022 21:30

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