Book Description

In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong has brought together a collection of over 180 poems to form the first comprehensively-annotated selection of Hardy's poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet's career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically. Headnotes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources, and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy's manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give full explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy's notebooks, letters, and autobiography. Tim Armstrong's critical introduction discusses Hardy's career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence 'Poems of 1912-13' is included in its entirety. Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems will prove essential reading for undergraduate and sixth-form students of English literature and all those interested in early modern poetry.