Thomas Hardy. Selected Poetry

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets. Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he had retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century. His verse touches all the common themes of human existence: birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death. If Hardy`s age brings anything to them, it is an old man`s ironic and elegiac sense that in life hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness.