Hardy is always writing a poem about an experience that he was unable to experience in the moment in which it happened. So this kind of ghostly, poetic recreation of the experience has comes through through self unseeing and then translates into really hypnotic little poems. We mention that larken was a great follower of hardy. That the poet who quotes that poem isnt fartini, who took hardy as someone who could inspire his own localism. In his poem, the birthplace ande he cites afterwards, hardy's poem is an example of the marvel rooted in every day and calls it a bringing of human existence into a fuller life. so i think he needs an important
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