Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years. Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication and Hardy was criticized for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex. He left fiction writing for poetry, and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).
Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with an extraordinary variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased during the course of the century, offering an alternative—more down-to-earth, less rhetorical—to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of Yeats. Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1928.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1920)
Moments of Vision (Macmillan, 1917)
Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1916)
Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914)
Time's Laughingstocks (Macmillan, 1909)
The Dynasts (Macmillan, 1904)
Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902)
Letters
Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891)
The Woodlanders (Harper & Bros., 1887)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (J. W. Lovell, 1886)
Two on a Tower (J. W. Lovell, 1882)
A Laodicean (Harper & Bros., 1881)
The Trumpet Major (Henry Holt & Co., 1880)
The Return of the Native (Henry Holt & Co., 1878)
Far from the Madding Crowd (Smith, Elder & Co., 1876)
The Hand of Ethelberta (Henry Holt & Co., 1876)
A Pair of Blue Eyes (Henry Holt & Co., 1873)
Under the Greenwood Tree (Tinsley Brothers, 1872)
Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers, 1871)
