Thomas Hardy's 'Poetical Matter' Notebook - Hardcover

Hardy, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199228493 ISBN 13: 9780199228492

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2009

Synopsis

An annotated edition of a previously unpublished and almost unknown Hardy notebook, one of the very few to have survived. Biographically significant because of its preservation of personal notes from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, 'Poetical Matter' is a unique late working notebook devoted to verse.

About this title

Review:

The editing throughout is superbly informative... gives the best insight we are likely to get into Hardy's working methods in manuscript (Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement)

the notebook offers a rich and vivid demonstration of the ways in which Hardy, astonishingly creative even into his mid-80s, worked persistently with ideas towards so many of the poems which were gathered into the remarkable final volume, Winter Words. With particular value from a biographical standpoint, we can catch tantalising glimpses of the mind of a genius work. (Geoff Ward, Western Daily Press)

a fascinating and thought-provoking miscellany of images and observations (English Studies)

Synopsis:

Thomas Hardy's 'Poetical Matter' notebook, the last to be published from among the small group of notebooks not destroyed by Hardy himself or by his executors, has now been meticulously edited with full scholarly annotation. Through its inclusion of so many notes copied by Hardy from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, 'Poetical Matter' reaches back to all periods of his life, and is especially valuable from a biographical standpoint for its expansion and enhancement of knowledge of Hardy's final years and for its preservation of such intimate records as his richly revealing memories of the Bockhampton of his childhood and his sexually charged impressions of a woman glimpsed during a trip on a pleasure steamer in 1868. Its special distinctiveness nevertheless lies in its uniqueness as a late working notebook devoted specifically to verse. Florence Hardy, Hardy's widow, recalled his having experienced a great outburst of late creativity, feeling that he could go on writing almost indefinitely, and 'Poetical Matter' bears direct witness to his actively thinking about poetry and projecting and composing new poems until shortly before his death at the age of eighty-seven.As such, it contains an abundance of new ideas for poems and sequences of poems and demonstrates Hardy's characteristic creative progression, his working variously with initial ideas, with gathered notes, whether old or new, and with tentative prose formulations, verse fragments, metrical schemes, and rhyme patterns, towards the writing of the drafts from which, yet further worked and reworked, the completed poem would ultimately emerge.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0199228493
• ISBN 13: 9780199228492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 158
• Editor: Dalziel Pamela, Millgate Michael