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Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.
Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication. He left fiction writing for poetry and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).
Hardy’s poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with a variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Robert Frost, Wystan Hugh Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased over the course of the twentieth century, offering a more down-to-earth, less rhetorical alternative to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of William Butler Yeats. Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1928.
John McCrae was born on November 30, 1872. A Canadian doctor and teacher who served in World War...
Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England, on March 26, 1859. He...
Dana Burnet was born in Ohio in 1888. He was the author of Poems (Harper & Brothers,...
Joyce Kilmer was born on December 6, 1886, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The author...
Philip Edward Thomas was born in London in 1878. A close friend of the poet
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, in 1869. Best known for his poem "For the...