Oh how I love Thomas Hardy's writing! I just finished reading Selected Poems, a book I had picked up at a little museum in Dorsetshire during a trip for the class I took on Dickens and Hardy. I had read some of the poems before, but never all through. Hardy does an excellent job of describing various aspects of life. He manages to do this in a rhythm I understand, something not all poetry does.

A stunning, life-altering revelation. I had been aware since my undergraduate days of Hardy's second career as a poet -- one of the strangest in the history of English letters -- and the nearly fanatical devotion he engendered among readers of a certain stripe, without ever having made the effort to penetrate the mystery of his verse. The wait has been richly rewarded. As many other critics have noted, Hardy wrote some of the weirdest verse imaginable; Robert Mezey, in his cheerleader-ly introduction, quotes Donald Davie's assessment that in the face of Hardy's verse "one honest critic after another has by his own confession retired, baffled and defeated." Its quality seems wildly uneven; along lyrics of stunning penetration stand passages that A. E. Housman would have rejected as corny. Its often jarring rhythms and unpredictable meter make it seem at times almost proto-modernist, while the insistence on archaic and rural language have the purity and strangeness of some bizarre lost pre-Middle English folk poet; the Gawain poet as imagined by John Clare and written by Hopkins, perhaps? Truly there is no comparison. The sadness, the effortless expression of the profoundest metaphysical questions in the simplest, most natural language, the force of his poetic imagination... this is work that defies description, in the most positive of ways. In a personal sense, a reading experience like this stands as a re-affirmation of the beautiful endlessness of poetry. ( )

My least favorite Hardy to date. Probably a 3.5 star read after the second half but I really struggled feeling engaged in the first half. ( )