I teach Hardy every other year in my “Modern British Poetry“ course at Wells College, and this year I decided to use “The Darkling Thrush” to introduce his work to students, many of whom had not read him before. As I looked particularly closely at the poem in preparation for the class—and then, later, during [...]

Click here (and scroll to the bottom of the page) to read the poem sequence. I’d like to start by making a claim that I have recently asserted elsewhere: The lyric poem is fundamentally elegiac. That is, the lyric constitutes both the inscription of a moment’s utterance and a memento mori—an object that cannot help [...]

On April 15, 1912, on her maiden voyage, the British steamer Titanic, the world’s largest and most luxurious ship, struck an iceberg in mid-Atlantic and sank. The White Star Line’s ships had previously suffered major wrecks and loss of life in 1854, 1873, and 1893. But 1,500 people, more than half the Titanic’s passengers, died, [...]

  “Effulgent” by David M. Katz           Part seemed she of the effulgent thought –“Her Initials,” Thomas Hardy   Glitter, brilliance, candor, dazzle; Luster, splendor, lambent lightness; She evokes a lucid ghazal All shot through with flashing brightness: Of those words, he chose “effulgent.” Anhedonic to a fault, dour Hardy’s verse betrays his waning Adolescent [...]

How can you account for the love you have for a favorite poem?  One way is simply to say that it sparks personal associations for you. For me, that’s true in the case of “Neutral Tones,” as I suspect it is for the many who regard it as one their favorite Hardy poems. After all, [...]

Read the poem here. When beginning to think about the poem “During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy, I thought it might be useful to go back for some context to the old pessimist Yvor Winters, who always had provocative things to say about form.  If he was a pessimist, well, so was Thomas Hardy.  [...]

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Last Signal” is one of his finest elegies. That is already saying a good deal, since a great many of his poems could be defined as elegiac in tone, if not actually in strict form. This clearly is the case with almost all of the poems written about his first wife, [...]

  Thomas Hardy is still far better known as a novelist than he is as a poet. Although certain poems have lodged themselves where, as Frost put it, they will be hard to get rid of, there is still a widespread conviction that much of his poetry is either awkward, difficult or just downright bad. [...]