This work comprises a collection of the poetic works of Thomas Hardy. Hardy's poetry spanned over 50 years from the last half of the 19th century to the period after World War I, and ranges from pessimistic works to those which were witty and fanciful.

Though best remembered as one of the foremost Victorian realists who created classic works of fiction like Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy always considered himself to be more a poet than a novelist at heart. Over time, critics and fans alike have warmed to Hardy's verse, and his influence has been cited by several acclaimed contemporary poets, including Philip Larkin. This poetry collection brings together some of Hardy's most accomplished works.

In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong has brought together a collection of over 180 poems to form the first comprehensively-annotated selection of Hardy's poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet's career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically. Headnotes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources, and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy's manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give full explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy's notebooks, letters, and autobiography. Tim Armstrong's critical introduction discusses Hardy's career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence 'Poems of 1912-13' is included in its entirety. Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems will prove essential reading for undergraduate and sixth-form students of English literature and all those interested in early modern poetry.

Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet is higher now than it has ever been. It is generally agreed that the Poems of 1912-13, written in memory of his first wife, are some of the greatest elegies in the language. This invaluable new study concentrates on the 'Emma Poems', setting them in the context of Hardy's troubled first marriage, then analysing them one by one. John Greening - a poet himself and author of the Greenwich Exchange Guides to Poets of the First World War and W.B. Yeats - highlights the distinctive music of this twenty-one poem 'suite', while exploring the sexual and spiritual tensions concealed witihn Hardy's Dorsetshire and North Cornish landscapes.

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...' After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy's works available in Penguin Classics are A Laodicean, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Selected Poems, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Pursuit of the Well-beloved and The Well-beloved, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, The Woodlanders, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree.

Thomas Hardy wrote some of the most moving and personal poems in his era and this collection brings together the best of his verse on life and love. Hardy's poems are by turn haunting, intense, songlike humerous and tender. From snatched lovers' meetings to the wreck of the Titanic from the death of a Dorest drummer boy in the Boer War to memories of his dead wife Emma, from ghosts, loss and longing to pleasure in landscape and weather, they tell the story of one of our best-loved writers, and the people and places that inspired him.