''Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses'' is a collection of poems by
English
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poet
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...
, and was published in 1909. It includes poems of various dates, mainly concerned with rural, familial and provincial life.
Dates and thematics
The collection contains poems of various dates, with almost a third of its 94 poems having been published before the book's publication. A not untypical thematic stress on life's ironies is present, though Hardy himself was insistent that the title phrase was a poetic image only, and not to be taken as a philosophical belief. He also pointed out that behind the "I" of the poems stood not autobiography so much as "dramatic monologues by different characters".
Significant poems
Hardy himself considered "
A Trampwoman's Tragedy
"A Trampwoman's Tragedy" is a 1903 narrative poem in 104 lines by Thomas Hardy. Hardy ranked the poem highly amongst his works, and came to believe that it was "upon the whole his most successful poem."
Synopsis
The poem features a homeless "tramp ...
" the best of all his poems.
Gilbert Murray
George Gilbert Aimé Murray (2 January 1866 – 20 May 1957) was an Australian-born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece ...
thought "He Abjures Love" had a
Horatian
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...
quality; and
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
saw "The Revisitation" as anticipating Hardy's ''
Poems 1912-13''.
[M. Seymour-Smith, ''Thomas Hardy'' (London 1994) p. 307 and p. 682]
See also
*
Casterbridge Fair
References
External links
The complete text
1909 poems
English poetry collections
Poetry by Thomas Hardy
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