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THOMAS HARDY: 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 ).