Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1922. While covering a typical (for Hardy) range of subjects - such as mismatchings, grotesqueries, and ironic memories - the poems generally take a musical shape, often remembering the past in ballad format. Hardy prefaced the collection with a self-styled Apology, beginning prosaically by reporting some half of the poems included as recent, the remainder as old, but continuing with a broader defence of his poetic principles. Against charges of systematic pessimism, he maintained that his poetry was instead "really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate". As if to protest further the charge of pessimism, Hardy opened the collection with the cheerfully lyrical 'Weathers', though he closed it with the self-searching meditation 'Surview'. Other notable poems paid tribute to the friend of his youth, Horace Moule, and to his second wife, Florence Dugdale; while others recalled once again Hardy's first wife Emma, perhaps representing a final coming-to-terms with the memory of their marriage. Many of the poems have been subsequently set to music, by a variety of different composers. (wikipedia.org)

This volume aims to present all Blake's verse, including scattered fragments and epigrams and also to provide as much annotation as is necessary to make the poetry accessible to the reader