Book group discussion of Thomas Hardy Poems, 15 July 2015

On 15 July, Gillian Southgate and the book group looked at the poetry of Thomas 

Hardy.  Tracing his life and poetry chronologically, Gill showed how Hardy's 

descriptions of, and concerns for, the natural world, coloured much of his poetry 

up to 1912, when his first wife, Emma Gifford, died.  The love poetry that followed

consolidated Hardy's reputation as a poet, as well as a novelist. The tenderness, 

regret and pent-up grief informing the 1912 poems brought critical acclaim. 

Already famous as the writer of 'Far from the Madding Crowd', 'The Mayor of 

Casterbridge', 'Jude the Obscure' and others, Hardy on his death in 1928 had become

the Grand Old Man of English letters. His coffin was carried into Westminster Abbey 

by fellow poets Housman and Kipling, the playwrights Shaw and J.M. Barrie, the 

novelists Conrad and Galsworthy, the writer Edmund Gosse, and the Prime Minister 

and the Leader of the Opposition. No anthology since has been complete without the 

inclusion of his best poetry -'The Darkling Thrush', 'The Convergence of the Twain',

'Channel Firing', 'After a Journey', 'At Castle Botterel' and the poignant 'During Wind 

and Rain'.  Hardy wrote in excess of nine hundred poems in his lifetime, and learned 

his craft in the writing of them. Technically, they are superb, and the emotional charge 

so many carry has a lasting effect on most of his readers. His influence on that most 

reticent of poets, Philip Larkin, has been well-documented.