Hardy, Thomas

Abstract

Prolific novelist, short‐story writer, and poet, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is forever connected to the landscape of southern England he called Wessex. Though he reached a mass audience during his lifetime, it was only during the second half of the twentieth century that scholars secured his reputation as one of the major writers of Victorian and modern literature. Brilliantly innovative in his handling of mixed genres and discourses in narrative, he experimented widely with words, stanza forms, and meter in poetry. Influenced by Gothic architecture and the visual arts, Hardy explored the power of the image to capture feeling. His poetry enacts how the mind registers both external reality and the shock of new awareness, when unburied emotions impinge on the present. While his fiction questions cultural assumptions and Victorian morality, his poetry transformed the meditative lyric, elegy, pastoral, and epic for modern times.