Thomas Hardy free essay sample

But it can be used as a way in to the study of Thomas | | | |Hardys poems generally. | | | |About Thomas Hardy | | | |Hardy lived from 1840 to 1928. He was the son of a mason, from Dorset, in the south west of England. He studied | | | |to be an architect, and worked in this profession for many years. He also began to write prose fiction. His first| | | |effort (The Poor Man and the Lady) was never published, but his second novel was published in 1871. This was | | | |Desperate Remedies. It was not well-received, but the next book, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), did better. | | | |Hardy eventually published many novels these vary in merit but include many which are established as | | | |masterpieces of English fiction: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge,| | | |The Woodlanders, Tess of the dUrbervilles and Jude the Obscure. | | | |Back to top | | | |Hardy enjoyed ommercial success, but his work proved controversial, and his publishers continually tried to tone| | | |it down. We will write a custom essay sample on Thomas Hardy or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Critics savagely condemned his last two novels, Jude and Tess (as they are abbreviated for convenience). | | | |Hardy no longer needed to write prose fiction for a living the royalties from his existing work gave him more | | | |than enough security. He had always preferred poetry and believed that he was better as a writer in this form. | | | |He wrote verse throughout his life, but did not publish a volume until Wessex Poems and Other Verses (for which | | | |he did his own illustrations) appeared in 1898. Hardy certainly made up for lost time, eventually publishing six | | | |collections of verse as well as the huge poetic drama, The Dynasts, of which the first part appeared in 1904. | | | |Thomas Hardy was married twice his first marriage, long and mostly unhappy, was to Emma Gifford. They married | | | |in 1874. Emma died in 1912, and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who later became his | | | |biographer. Hardy died in 1928, aged 87. He had asked to be laid beside Emma, but his body was buried in Poets | | | |Corner in Westminster Abbey. Only his heart was placed in Emmas grave or was it? There is a curious story that| | | |his housekeeper placed the heart on the kitchen table, where his sisters cat seized it, and ran off into the | | | |nearby woods. In this version of events, a pigs heart was duly buried beside Emma. | | | |Back to top | | | |[pic] | | | |War poems | | | |Hardy wrote poems at the times of the second Boer War of 1899-1902 and the Great War of 1914-1918. Some poems | | | |obviously reflect these particular conflicts (Drummer Hodge and Channel Firing, for example). But others, though | | | |written at the time, have a more general relevance such as The Man He Killed and In Time of â€Å"The Breaking of | | | |Nations†. This is not accidental Hardy explicitly tried to relate specific historical conflicts to a wider | | | |historical scheme. He attempted to do this in a grand or epic poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars The Dynasts | | | |(which has three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes). In this he also relates the great | | | |moments of history to the lives of ordinary people. | | | |Hardys war poems show a great diversity of attitude. We cannot, on their evidence alone, identify a clear-cut | | | |opinion of war to which Hardy keeps consistently. Channel Firing presents a horribly pessimistic view of mans | | | |bellicose stupidity. In Time of â€Å"The Breaking of Nations† is triumphantly optimistic in asserting the fact that | | | |the good things of everyday life will survive when wars are long forgotten. | | | |Back to top | | | |The Going of the Battery captures the sadness (for those left behind) that war brings, but no criticism of war is| | | |stated or implied. The reference to â€Å"Honour† in the fourth stanza suggests that the soldiers cause is worth | | | |fighting for. | | | |In Drummer Hodge, while he shows the tragedy and waste of war, and perhaps implies that Hodges sacrifice is | | | |rendered futile by his ignorance of the land over which he is fighting, yet Hardy makes no explicit criticism of | | | |war. | | | |In The Man He Killed, on the other hand, Hardys skilful device of the narrators vain attempt to justify his | | | |action is an obvious indictment of war, as it is clear that he has no reason to kill his â€Å"foe†. | | |Back to top | | | |The Going of the Battery | | | |Stanza 1 | stanza 2 | stanza 3 | stanza 4 | stanza 5 | stanza 6 | stanza 7 | discussing the poem | | | |This poem is about what happens when a group of soldiers and their field guns leave for service overseas. The | | | |guns collectively are the â€Å"battery† of the title, though this noun normally includes also the men who operate | | | |them an artillery company.