Thomas Hardy
Her Haunting Ground: Selected Poems
4th Edition
Published on 28. March 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
120 pages
978-1-86171-531-9 (ISBN)
Description
THOMAS HARDY: HER HAUNTING GROUND: SELECTED POEMS
A selection of Thomas Hardy's finest poems.
Thomas Hardy's poetry lies at the core of his artistic achievement. Or he would like to think so. It is the novels, in particular Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native that have made Hardy popular with readers and critics. For Hardy, though, the poetry is at the heart of his artistic life. It contains his deepest emotions, his thoughts on the most intimate matters. The poetry is, as Robert Graves said, a 'spiritual autobiography'.
Thomas Hardy's own biography, The Life of Thomas Hardy, was somewhat manufactured for the critics. The 'private' Hardy, the inner 'Thomas Hardy', one might say, is to be found in the poetry.
Thomas Hardy's poetry is sensual, physical, concise, lyrical, and personal. It is seemingly 'plain' and unadorned, yet it is full of an arcane vocabulary - 'tangled bine-stems' appear in 'The Darkling Thrush', for instance. Hardy loves the obscure word, some of them being culled from Dorset folklore and legend. He was also complex in his use of stanza forms. As W.H. Auden wrote: 'no English poet, not even Donne or Browning, employed so many and so complicated stanza forms'.
Thomas Hardy's subject is love, love experienced and lost, seen from a distance, as a voyeur or observer, or remembered from the vantage point of old age. Hardy's poetry is sober, humorous, and self-loathing. He wallows in his nostalgic recreation of former love affairs. He keeps going back over crisis points, such as that moment when they first met, or their first argument, or when the beloved went out at night and the lover, thinking she had gone, was surprised when she returned and kissed him (in 'That Kiss in the Dark').
Includes a new gallery of illustrations and an introduction.
The text has been revised for this edition.
120 pages. www.crmoon.com
More details
Edition
4th ed.
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
196 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-86171-531-9 (9781861715319)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and
Philip Larkin.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.