'His subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.' 'I think most poets who are well known today have loved Hardy's poems', wrote Philip Larkin; 'they may have found what I found, that Hardy gave them the confidence to feel in their own way.' Thomas Hardy had written his first poem, 'Domicilium', in 1857, when he was seventeen. But it was not until his fifties that Hardy the novelist was rich enough to concentrate again on poetry, and not until his seventies that he was producing the works of his great maturity, among them the elegies to his wife Emma in 'Poems of 1912-13'. For this volume Harry Thomas provides not a representative selection, but rather a much needed 'working selection' of Hardy's best poetry. He gives full and illuminating notes to the poems, and appendices contain Hardy's Preface to his edition of the poetry of William Barnes and his 'Apology' from Late Lyrics and Earlier.