Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

English poet and novelist. Born in Dorset as son of a stone-mason, young Hardy was taught the violin by his father, and was encouraged to read books by his mother. At 16 he was apprenticed to a local architect, later moving to London, and returning home to continue architectural work.

With the success of his fourth novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy gave up architecture for writing, and he has since remained a popular novelist of the Victorian Age. However, his 'pessimism' and 'immorality' to be found in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) received bitter and hostile reviews, and Hardy gave up the writing of fiction to concentrate on poetry. He left over 900 poems in eight collections including Wessex Poems (1898). While Hardy followed William Wordsworth and Robert Browning in writing verse in the language of daily speech, he experimented constantly with rhyme and other verse forms. Today, Hardy is highly appraised as the 'father of modern poetry'. Hardy is one of the poets who left an exceptionally large number of literary ballads, the others being A. C. Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling. Here again, Hardy experimented variously with the subject matters and narrative techniques of the traditional ballad. The rural characters in Hardy's novels sang the ballads current in Dorset. Hardy originally intended to write in ballad stanza his epic-drama of the war with Napoleon, The Dynasts (1904,1906, 1908).   (M. Y.)