![]() Hardy published his first collection of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in 1898, and Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. Even though he had been writing poetry since the 1850s, he had published little of it, preferring instead the money that novel-writing brought him. After critics panned Jude the Obscure, Hardy stopped writing novels and devoted himself to poetry. Hardy's future novels, many of which were also first serialized, include The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-Major: A Tale (1880), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882), The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid (1883), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1892), and Jude the Obscure (1896). The novel also identified Hardy with rural characters and the fictional region he called Wessex, which he based on Dorset and the surrounding area. The unexpected success in 1874 of Far from the Madding Crowd, which was serialized in Cornhill, cemented Hardy's reputation as a first-rate novelist and allowed him to devote all of his time to writing. Critics praised his next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), comparing it to the work of George Eliot. ![]() In 1871, he published the novel Desperate Remedies in three volumes with William Tinsley, but its sales were mediocre. ![]() In 1868, he finished his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, but no one would publish it. Hardy, however, read and wrote regularly all the while and, in 1865, he published his first piece, the short story "How I Built My House," which appeared in Chamber's Journal.Īlthough Hardy's first love was poetry, he made his reputation as a novelist. He returned to Dorset in 1867 and worked again with Hicks, this time overseeing the restoration of old village churches. In 1856, Hardy apprenticed with architect John Hicks and, in 1862, he moved to London to work with Arthur Blomfield's architectural firm. Hardy entered the new school at Lower Bockhampton in 1848 already knowing how to read. ![]() Hardy's father, who played the violin, and his mother, who loved books, encouraged their frail son's pursuit of literature early on. Poet and novelist Thomas Hardy was born in the third year of Queen Victoria's reign on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, to Thomas Hardy, a stonemason, and Jemima (Hand) Hardy. Victorian era came to an end and the modern era was about to begin. The poem also frequently appears in poetry anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Poetry because it is a transitional poem, illustrating the trepidation and doubt many people felt about the future as the Harper & Brothers published Poems of the Past and the Present in an edition of one thousand copies, and a few months later a second edition was published in an edition of five hundred copies. "The Darkling Thrush" is included in his second volume of verse, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), in the section "Miscellaneous Poems," sandwiched between "The Last Chrysanthemum" and "The Comet at Yell'ham," two other bleak poems of nature. A few years earlier he had stopped writing novels, after critics panned Jude the Obscure, and turned to writing poetry exclusively. Hardy was sixty years old when he penned the lyric, far past the life expectancy for a man of his time. This is partially offset, however, by the artfulness of the poem itself. Like much of Hardy's writing, "The Darkling Thrush" embodies the writer's despair and pessimism. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle "By the Century's Deathbed" and then published in London Times on New Year's Day, 1901, the thirty-two-line poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Thomas Hardy's gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, "The Darkling Thrush," remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics.
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