Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

Thomas Hardy is unique in English literature as a major novelist who is also a major poet. His collected poetry is among the most distinctive bodies of verse in the language, and includes such pinnacles of the lyric tradition as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the series of haunted love-elegies written in memory of his first wife Emma and such instantly recognizable titles as ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, ‘Convergence of the Twain’. It is also among the most controversial.