Wessex Poems and Other Verses (often referred to simply as Wessex Poems) is a collection of fifty-one poems set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape by English writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in London and New York in 1898 by Harper Brothers, and contained a number of illustrations by the author himself.
The collection met a broadly hostile reception, critics being accustomed to Hardy as a (controversial) writer of prose alone. [1] Hardy himself was taken aback by the failure to recognise his dry humour, as in the (slightly bawdy) 'Bride-Night Fire'. [2]
On a more personal note, his wife Emma disliked the section consisting of love lyrics to various recipients; and especially 'The Ivy Wife', which she felt aimed at her. [3]
Two notable early poems from the collection (1860s) were "Hap" and 'Amabel' - the latter exploring the theme of sexual attraction impacted by age taken up by The Well-Beloved. [4] 'She at His Funeral' was a tribute to Hardy's friend Horace Moule; [5] while the bitter "Neutral Tones" and the cheerful 'Sergeant's Song' show further aspects of Hardy's range of poetic subjects. [6]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
Donald Alfred Davie, FBA was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. His itinerant lectures were a success in England and in 1905–1930 in the United States, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with a US partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire, Wales, where he set two novels, and in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963.
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, known as R. D. Blackmore, was one of the most famous English novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. He won acclaim for vivid descriptions and personification of the countryside, sharing with Thomas Hardy a Western England background and a strong sense of regional setting in his works.
Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism.
Martin Roger Seymour-Smith was a British poet, literary critic, and biographer.
Poems of 1912–1913 are an elegiac sequence written by Thomas Hardy in response to the death of his wife Emma, in November 1912. An unsentimental meditation upon a complex marriage, the sequence's emotional honesty and direct style made its poems some of the most effective and best-loved lyrics in the English language.
Satires of Circumstance is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1914. It includes the 18 poem sequence Poems 1912-13 on the death of Hardy's wife Emma - extended to the now-classic 21 poems in Collected Poems of 1919 - widely regarded to comprise the best work of his poetic career.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
Emma Lavinia Gifford was an English writer and suffragist, who was the first wife of the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy.
In literature regionalism refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features, such as dialect, customs, history, and landscape, of a particular region. The setting is particularly important in regional literature and the "locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial."
William Hayward Roberts was an English born schoolmaster, poet and biblical critic, cleric and Provost of Eton College.
Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy published in 1917. His largest poetic collection, Moments of Vision is unusually unified in emotional tone, and is considered to include some of the finest work of his late poetic career.
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 range of subjects - such as mismatchings, grotesqueries, and ironic memories - the poems generally take a musical shape, often remembering the past in ballad format.
Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles is the penultimate collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1925. A miscellaneous collection, Human Shows included old, new, and updated poems.
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres is the last, posthumous collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1928. The collection shows Hardy continued his metrical experimentation to the end, with his poetic energies undiminished.
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1909. It includes poems of various dates, mainly concerned with rural, familial and provincial life.
Poems of the Past and the Present is the second collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1901. A wide-ranging collection, divided into five headings, it contains some of Hardy's most powerful and lasting poetic contributions.
Wessex Poems public domain audiobook at LibriVox