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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.
Eugenio Montale was bornin Genoa, Italy, in 1896. He served as an infantry officer in World War I...
English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on August 3, 1887. The son of the Rugby School’s...
Vera Brittain was born in 1893 in Staffordshire. She served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid...
Born in 1892, Archibald MacLeish was a poet, critic, and playwright who fought in World War I....
Czeslaw Milosz, born in 1911, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of...
Florence Earle Coates was born in 1850 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the author of...