With an Introduction, Bibliography and Glossary by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Cambridge. Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own life-time. Hardy is now recognized not only as a great poet, but also as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly and ordinary readers alike.