He would get up at four o'clock in the morning before he went to work to learn some of the latin poetis. He was an auto didact from the age of 16 onwards. Would stay up until after midnight every night in his room in westbourne park villas, reading and writing poetry. But he tells us it was all rejected. We actually haven't got any rejection slips, so we can't verify that. There's one of his very earliest poems called she to him. I think this one is particularly powerful for a young man. When you shall see me in the toils of time, my lorded beauties carried off from me. My eyes no longer
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