Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) always viewed novel-writing as a craft, a necessary means of making money. His vocation was poetry.
Apart from his genius, the sheer scale of Hardy's achievement is extraordinary: more than 900 poems produced in sixty-odd years, the last ones, written in his seventies, deeper and stronger first. wrote about anything everything - London and Dorset, war and nature, marriage as well as love - in poems that draw their lifeblood from ballads and folksongs. They impress us as being his own local rhythms of thought, conveying passion uninhibited by good manners, in a style 'reduced to riches'. As well as millions of readers, poets as different as W. H. Auden and John Betjeman have acknowledged a debt to Hardy. Perhaps, as Philip Larkin has…