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In Our Time: Thomas Hardy's Poetry

13/01/2022

Thomas Hardy's Poetry

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Thomas Hardy's Poetry

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hardy's goal of being a great poet and how he succeeded.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hardy's poems, which he prized far above the novels which made him famous and rich, and his ambition to be ranked alongside Shelley and Byron.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Hardy (1840 -1928) and his commitment to poetry, which he prized far above his novels.  In the 1890s, once he had earned enough from his fiction, Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and returned to the poetry he had largely put aside since his twenties.  He hoped that he might be ranked one day alongside Shelley and Byron, worthy of inclusion in a collection such as Palgrave's Golden Treasury which had inspired him. Hardy kept writing poems for the rest of his life, in different styles and metres, and he explored genres from nature,  to war, to epic.  Among his best known are what he called his Poems of 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma (1840 -1912), who he credited as the one who had made it possible for him to leave his work as an architect's clerk and to write the novels that made him famous.

With

Mark Ford
Poet, and Professor of English and American Literature, University College London.

Jane Thomas
Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds

And 

Tim Armstrong
Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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