Selected Poetry (Oxford World's Classics)

by Thomas Hardy (Author), Samuel Hynes (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.24

  Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets. Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he had retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century. His verse touches all the common themes of human existence: birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death. If Hardy's age brings anything to them, it is an old man's ironic and elegiac sense that in life hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness. This collection is prepared by Samuel Hynes, editor of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, and selected from the Oxford Authors critical edition. The introduction and notes illuminate Hardy's central place in the tradition of English poetry.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $24.50

  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is now recognized as a major poet of striking originality. He is widely admired for his particularly vivid expression of feeling, from the religious ecstasy of The Blessed Virgin to the torments of his loneliness and despair in No Worst , and for conveying with wonderful freshness his sense of natural beauty in such poems as The Windhover and Pied Beauty . This selection, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition, includes all his major English poems and most of the larger fragments. The poems are supported with extensive notes and a useful introduction to Hopkins's life and poetry.