Self-taught, Thomas Hardy knew a good deal about English poetry when, in his fifties, he laid the fictions by and returned to his first love. He was an honest craftsman, attending meticulously to what ...

In 1912, when he was 72, Thomas Hardy began to write a series of love poems about his wife, Emma. The poems were unlikely for several reasons. First, for years he and Emma had been estranged, and she ...

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. These are the opening lines of the English poet Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain,” which he wrote for a London benefit ...

The 20th-century poet Philip Larkin is as responsible as anyone for the revival of the poetry of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Hardy is still best known as a novelist, but he thought of himself primarily ...

When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, her loss unstoppered a flood of poetry in Hardy. Taken together, his poems about Emma constitute the most original, strangest and arguably the ...

THOMAS HARDY (286 pp.)—Edmund Blunden—Macmillan ($3). HARDY AND THE LADY FROM MADISON SQUARE (264 pp.)—Carl J. Weber—Colby ($5). In the 18903 Thomas Hardy was at the summit of his novelist’s career.

In the summer of 1926, Thomas Hardy was visited at his house in Dorset by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, she being "the daughter of his old editor Leslie Stephen." Hardy, Claire Tomalin reports in this ...

In the musical Life After, a teenager coping with the loss of her father struggles with the limitations of conventional speech for expressing the complex emotions that surge through the mourning ...