ABSTRACT

‘It is impossible to understand why the bulk of this volume was published at all,’ wrote a reviewer of Wessex Poems in 1899. Having got used to Hardy the novelist, the public with its usual conservatism took a long time to come to terms with Hardy the poet. Today, though, his work is valued highly. Poets as different as Sassoon, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Graves and Larkin have all expressed deep admiration for him. ‘There have been relatively few poet-novelists in English literature’, wrote the editor of the 1960 Penguin Poets edition, ‘… the only authentic double-firsts in this field are, I believe, Hardy and D.H. Lawrence’.