Wessex Poems and Other Verses

Thomas Hardy was fifty-eight and famous as a novelist when he brought out his first book of verse in 1898, having quit fiction after the abuse heaped on Jude the Obscure. The poems gathered here were written across three decades, some reaching back to the 1860s, and Hardy drew the thirty odd illustrations himself. The subjects are the ones his novels kept circling: chance, a universe that is not listening, love that has cooled into something colder. “Hap” and “Neutral Tones” sit alongside ballads of the Wessex countryside and its dialect. Critics were unsure what to make of a novelist turning poet at that age. He kept at it for another thirty years and won the argument. Free in PDF and EPUB.