He was writing a lot of sonnets in the voice of this woman who was probably based on a woman he was seeing at the time called eliza nichols. They 're rather complex poems, and illustrate philip larkins's contention that every hardy poem has a spinal chord of thought running through it. Between 19 seventys, 18 71 and 18 78, he was writing roughly a novel a year,. which is phenomenal when you think about it. Btroun about th 18 eighties, he lost his way. The novels he produced, er aleodice and hand of ethelberta, were not well received. He also had a physical breakdown er and
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