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.
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