Critical Views

Critical and scholarly work on Hardy is probably 70% about the novels and 30% about the poems; within the body of work about the poems, a large portion of that — perhaps half — concerns the Poems of 1912–13. And yet much important work has been done on the poems more generally, so this chapter will offer some representative critical views of Hardy’s verse, both from his time and more recently, culminating with studies of four contemporary Hardy scholars whose focus is primarily the poetry, especially the broad views of his poems.