The Early Poetry of Thomas Hardy

This study aims at exploring the form and vision in the poetry of Thomas Hardy with particular reference to the Wessex Poems, his first collection of published poems. It seeks to present a comprehensive overview of Hardy’s poetry in terms of his major preoccupations as artist and craftsman. Hardy’s poetic vision is informed by a melancholic and tragic apprehension of life and nature. The dominant themes in Hardy’s poetry such as love, nature, war, death, time, the supernatural, the rustic and the agrarian have been deftly articulated in various poetic forms such as the ballad, the sonnet, the lyric and the epic. An attempt has been made to examine the diction and imagery in the poetry of Hardy to suggest that it is not only the intensity of feeling and perception, but also the richness of texture which has immortalized him as a great literary genius.