Selected Poems - Softcover

Hardy, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140433414 ISBN 13: 9780140433418

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1993

Synopsis

Selected Poems

About this title

From the Back Cover

In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong brings together over 180 poems in the first comprehensively annotated selection of Hardy’s poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet’s career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically.

Head notes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy’s manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy’s notebooks, letters, and autobiography; and a bibliography suggests further reading.

Tim Armstrong’s critical Introduction discusses Hardy’s career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’ is included in its entirety.

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000).

Synopsis

Although best remembered today for his novels, Thomas Hardy thought of himself as a poet forced by circumstance to write fiction for a living. This generous selection of nearly two hundred poems includes such familiar pieces as "During Wind and Rain," "Channel Firing," "Afterwards," "The Darkling Thrush," and "The Oxen," but it will also acquaint readers with many less-celebrated works, among them "To Lizbie Browne," "After the Last Breath," "My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound," "The Haunter," "Old Furniture," "A Procession of Dead Days," "The Harbour Bridge," "At a Country Fair," "Last Love-Word," "Waiting Both," and "Proud Songsters." With an introduction and annotations by Robert Mezey, this Penguin Classics edition will help readers to recognize Hardy as one of the greatest English poets of this century.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140433414
• ISBN 13: 9780140433418
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Thomas Harry