Hardy: Selected Poems [Paperback]

If you are looking for a collection of Hardy's poetry, look no farther than this collection. The Penguin editors have done an incredible job of organizing the dense, complex body of Hardy's work into a very readable collection. This is more than just a simple "Hardy's greatest hits." Yes, there are the standard favorites here, but there is also an impressive collection of the writer's more obscure work. Reading the entire contents of this book is the best way to see the breadth of Hardy's existential and metaphysical angst.

After the Library of America edition of Robert Frost's poetry, this might be the best collection of poetry there is. Not only is Hardy one of the best poets ever (easily top five in the English language), but Mezey does a great job at putting together this collection. He selects the best of Hardy's poetry and a highly representative selection as well. His introduction is very well written and highly informative. It's like taking a quick class on Hardy. The poems are very much annotated, almost too much, but the notes are at the back of the book, so they are unobtrusive. There is a chronology and Mezey includes a few quotes, some of them quite witty, from Hardy. And all for an affordable price. You really can't beat this, and Hardy is one of those poets that should be on everyone's shelf.

A quick list of my favorite Hardy poems: Hap; Neutral Tones; At a Hasty Wedding; The Last Chrysanthemum; The Darkling Thrush; Mad Judy; The Ruined Maid; The Man He Killed; Channel Firing; Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?; Without Ceremony; The Haunter; The Voice; His Visitor; She Charged Me; At Tea; Over the Coffin; In the Moonlight; Near Lanivet, 1872; Something Tapped; The Ballet; A Backward Spring; At a Country Fair; A Night in November.

I commend this volume for three reasons. First and foremost for the 180 or so poems by Thomas Hardy (out of the approximately 950 he wrote). Among critics and self-professed serious students of English poetry, Hardy is often mildly disparaged as a poet. Yet among poets themselves, Hardy is/was admired and loved, even by "moderns" such as Pound, Jeffers, and Larkin.

Two aspects of Hardy's poetry stand out. One is his adherence to rhyme and meter. But Hardy is marvelously creative and diverse in his use of meter, his rhyming patterns, and the structure of his poems. He relies heavily on good old Anglo-Saxon words (many monosyllabic) and constructions. For those, like me, who often are uncomfortable with the free form and discursiveness of much modern poetry, Hardy is a welcome alternative. (The majority of the poems in this selection are less than twenty lines; very few are more than fifty.) The other conspicuous characteristic of Hardy's poetry is the somber atmosphere. The most common themes are death, the passage of time, nostalgia and regret. His poems are simple (few annotations are needed to read and understand them); they are more emotional than intellectual, more concrete than abstract; and they are very personal. Ultimately, then, THOMAS HARDY: SELECTED POEMS demonstrates a high degree of poetic craftsmanship and discipline and it constitutes a very moving body of work.

The second reason for commending this particular volume of Hardy's poems is Robert Mezey's Introduction and notes. At just over twenty pages, the Introduction is an ideal length. In it, Mezey succinctly makes his case for stating that "among the moderns", Hardy's "only peer is Frost and, perhaps, Yeats." One of the virtues of Hardy's poetry that Mezey identifies (and his selection confirms) is that with Hardy "the sense we get [is] that the moral and the aesthetic are rarely, if ever, separate things." The Introduction is learned, but it is not ivory tower: at one point Mezey compares a wonderful "song-like" rhyme in a Hardy poem with a rhyme from a Randy Travis song.

Lastly, this volume stands out for me for what it revealed of Thomas Hardy himself, that he was very decent and very human. I occasionally indulge myself by fantasizing about what it might have been like to spend an evening with a famous writer: of all famous writers, Thomas Hardy is one of those I most would have liked to have done so, and who (I sense) would have genuinely, without condescension, been interested in me.

One of several bonus features of the book is an Appendix containing miscellaneous comments Hardy made about poetry, writing, and life. Two of them seem worth sharing here:

"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."

"Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art."

After years - nay, decades - of reading only prose, I have resolved to expand my horizons (or, if you wish, deepen my soul) by reading poetry regularly - say about one book or collection each month. THOMAS HARDY: SELECTED POEMS proved to be an excellent beginning.

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