Weathers:
A Selection of Thomas Hardy’s Poems

ESTIMATED PUBLICATION DATE:
Summer 2025

Although Hardy is best known as a novelist whose reputation as a Victorian ‘realist’ in the company of George Eliot laid the way for the early 20th century novels of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D H Lawrence, he considered himself first a poet. His collected edition runs to nearly a thousand poems, and his range as a poet is considerable – from contemplative philosophical pieces to ballads of village life, and from lyric poems describing nature to love poems; his mood is sometimes severe, occasionally even embittered, but a genuine humanity shines through even the most pessimistic of his works, and a satirical, yet kindly, eye enlivens some of his portraits of individuals, written in a tone not dissimilar to the sonnets of E A Robinson [see our page on Loose Canons]. Hardy is a major poet whose importance, in our opinion, equals his reputation as a novelist.

We have compiled a selection of nearly sixty of Hardy’s poems which we hope will convey a useful and pleasing overview of his work. Many of his poems are very well known – ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘Afterwards’, ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’, and ‘The Ruined Maid’, to name a few – and these will be present. But we hope that most of the poems we have chosen will come to the readers as fine surprises.

We are considering several engravers in the hope of finding one whose sensibilities are in harmony with Hardy’s. The results of that are still to be determined, but we are confident we will find a good match.

We are tentatively hoping to publish Weathers in the Summer of 2025. We will offer more information as our plans become firmer.