Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems(Longman Annotated Texts)

In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong brings together over 180 poems in the first comprehensively annotated selection of Hardys poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poets career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically. Head notes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardys manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardys notebooks, letters, and autobiography; and a bibliography suggests further reading. Tim Armstrongs critical Introduction discusses Hardys 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.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Chronology Introduction Hardys second career Turning to poetry Poetry as posthumous vision Necessity and free will Typology and the pattern of a life Sequences and patterns God and history Hardy and the dead The Poems of 1912-13 Restoration and the past Wessex Hardys style The Gothic art-principle Words Prosody Hardy and literary tradition Selecting Hardy A note on the annotations A note on the text The Poems From Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898) The temporary the All Hap Neutral Tones The Peasants Confession A Sign-Seeker Friends Beyond Thoughts of Phena Natures Questioning In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury I look into my glass From Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) V.R. 1819-1901 Drummer Hodge The Souls of Slain Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats A Commonplace Day To an Unborn Pauper Child Her Reproach His Immortality Winter in Durnover Field The Darkling Thrush The Respectable Burgher on The Higher Criticism The Self-Unseeing In Tenebris I In Tenebris II In Tenebris III Tesss Lament Sapphic Fragment AΓΝΩΣΤΩӨЕΩ From Times Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909) The Revisitation A Trampwomans Tragedy In the Minds Eye He Abjures Love Let Me Enjoy Julie-Jane The Dead Quire Night in the Old Home After the Last Breath One We Knew George Meredith, 1828-1909 Yellham Woods Story A Young Mans Epigram on Existence From Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914) In Front of Landscape Channel Firing The Convergence of Twain When I set out for Lyonnesse Wessex Heights A Singer Asleep Self-Unconscious Under the Waterfall Poems of 1912-13 The Going Your Last Drive The Walk Rain on a Grave I found her out there Without Ceremony Lament The Haunt The Voice His Visitor A Circular A Dream or No After a Journey A Death-Day Recalled Beeny Cliff At Castle Boterel Places The Phantom Horsewoman The Spell of Rose St Launces Revisited Where the Picnic Was The Obliterate Tomb The Workbox Exeunt Omnes A Poet In the Cemetery From Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917) Moments of Vision The Voice of Things Apostrophes to an Old Psalm Tune At the Word Farewell Heredity Near Laniet, 1872 Copying Architecture in an Old Minster To Shakespeare Quid Hic Agis? On a Midsummer Eve The Blinded Bird The Statue of Liberty The Change Lines to a Movement in Mozarts E-Flat Symphony The Pedigree His Heart: A Womans Dream The Oxen The Photograph The Last Signal The Figure in the Scene Overlooking the River Stour The Musical Box Old Furniture The Five Students The Winds Prophecy During Wind and Rain A Backward Spring He Revisits His First School I thought, my heart The Shadow on the Stone For Life I had never cared greatly The Pity of It In Time of The Breaking of Nations A New Years Eve in War Time I looked up from my writing Afterwards From Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) Weathers According to the Might Working The Contretemps And There Was a Great Calm The Selfsame Song At Lulworth Cove a Century Back The Collector Cleans His Picture On the Tune Called the Old-Hundred-and-fourth Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard After a Romantic Day In the Small Hours Last Words to a Dumb Friend A Drizzling Easter Morning I was the midmost The Inscription The Whitewashed Wall After Reading Psalms XXXIX, XL, etc. Surview From Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) Waiting Both A Bird-Scene at a Rural Dwelling In a Former Resort after Many Years A Cathedral Façade at Midnight The Monument-Maker The Later Autumn An East-End Curate Sine Prole A Sheep Fair Snow in the Suburbs A Light Snow-Fall after Frost Music in a Snowy Street In Sherborne Abbey The Mock Wife Not only I Her Haunting-Ground Days to Recollect This Summer and Last Nothing matters much Before My Friend Arrived The Bird-Cathers Boy Song to an Old Burden Why do I? From Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) The New Dawns Business Proud Songsters The Prophetess A Wish for Unconsciousness The Love-Letters Throwing a Tree Lying Awake Childhood Among the Ferns A Poets Though I watched a blackbird A Nightmare, and the Next Thing So Various An Evening in Galilee We field-women He Never Expected Much Standing by the Mantelpiece Our Old Friend Dualism Drinking Song The Aged Newspaper Soliloquizes Christmas: 1924 The Boys Dream Family Portrait Christmas in the Elgin Room We are getting to the end He Resolves to Say No More From Hardys Uncollected Poems Thoughts from Sophocles The Eve of Waterloo Prologue Epilogue On One Who Thought No Other Could Write Such English as Himself Selections from Hardys Autobiography Appendix I: Two Early Versions of Poems by Hardy Appendix II

About the Author :
Tim Armstrong