In 1896 Thomas Hardy gave up novel-writing and began to relaunch his career as poet, which had been put on more or less indefinite hold back in the 1860s. By late 1895 Hardy's lastwritten novel, Jude the Obscure, had been published (The Well-Beloved, which appeared in book form in 1897, was first composed some years earlier), and it had caused a furore even greater than that which had greeted Tess of the d'Urbervilles four years previously. Wounded by what he saw as blinkered moralistic malice (and for other reasons which will be considered later), Hardy – who in many people's eyes, then and now, was at the height of his fictional powers – decided to quit. And over the last thirty-three years of his life, he produced eight volumes of poetry – totalling in excess of 960 poems – in addition to his huge verse-drama, The Dynasts. The first of these, Wessex Poems, appeared in 1898; the last, Winter Words, after his death in 1928. I rehearse these simple facts because they signal something of the nature and scale of the writer we have in hand, and of the difficulties which always traverse discussions of his work.

Born into a stonemason's family in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840, Hardy died eighty-eight years later, the Grand Old Man of English letters. His birth was fourteen years before the Crimean War, and his earlier life was spent in the world of Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Garibaldi, and Bismarck, when Tennyson and Dickens were in their prime. His death came ten years after the end of the First World War, his later years lived out in the world of Ramsay MacDonald, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, when T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were his literary contemporaries. The man whose early life coincides with the great period of railway expansion spent his old age being driven about in motor cars; the boy whose family played violins in the gallery ‘quire’ of a Dorset parish church grew into the oldman who heard Big Ben ring in the New Year on his ‘wireless’; born only six years after the Tolpuddle Martyrs were sentenced to transportation for forming a trade-union branch, Hardy was later to live through the General Strike of 1926.