Brief Background

The poet that I chose to research was Thomas Hardy. Hardy was born in 1840 in England and raised in a relatively low-class Victorian setting. He was apprenticed to an architect when he was young and made architecture his course of study while Attending The King's College in London. While there he won several awards for architecture and pursued and early young architectural career. In 1874 he instead decided to leave London, which he harbored a disdain for, and pursue a literary career. He wrote several novels including: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Native, and The Woodlanders. Despite success with his novels and a gained celebrity status, Hardy then chose to pursue his "first love", poetry. His first poetic volume Wessex Poems contained poems from the previous 30 years was published in 1898. Afterwards, he publishes poems sporadically. In 1912, his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford passed away which was an extremely traumatic event for Hardy. One of his biographers, Claire Tomalin, notes that after Emma's death , Hardy became a "truly great" English poet and his poems achieved a new depth and sense of sorrow. Hardy eventually remarried and died in 1928 at the age of 88. He has achieved great post mortem fame and is now recognized as one of the most masterful English poets. He is a noted Naturalist and Romanticist, elements which are extremely prominent in his poetry and life.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Brief Background, Continued from the information on top

I have really enjoyed reading Hardy's works and I have found his style quite interesting. He writes about many different subjects in the poems that I have posted and to each he observes from a naturalistic lens, a fact of his poetic style and personality. He was also born into and lived in the European Romantic period in which nature and its beauty were emphasized. In the video, it makes mention of Wessex, England, the place where Hardy called home. Ironically there is no Wessex, England, it is just a fictional place from old fairytales that Hardy, in a very Romantic mindset, liked to fantasize about his living in. His poetic volumes are as followed, some were published post mortem:


Collected Poems (1932)
Moments of Vision (1917)
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
The Dynasts (1908)
Time's Laughingstocks (1909)
Wessex Poems (1898)
Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters (1928)


A particularly informative biographical link can be found here, though I covered most of the main points of his life in my brief outline:
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/bio/hardy.htm
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)