Unexpected Elegies: Poems of 1912-13 and Other Poems About Emma [Paperback]

When Emma Hardy died in 1912, her husband, the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, began to write Poems of 191213, a series of elegies that are among the most moving in the English language. Although the couple had been estranged for years, after her death Hardy fell under Emmas spell again and was enthralled by her as he hadnt been in decades. He transformed his hopelessly revived love into poetry, pouring out his yearning and passionate attachment to a love forever lost.What an invaluable book! Thomas Hardys vivid, surprising, and metrically resourceful elegies, so ruthlessly truthful and wrenchingly clear, so filled with nostalgia and remorse, so tender, grief-stricken, and alive, are one of the great, shattering, open-hearted legacies of twentieth-century English poetry. We are made more human in reading them.Thomas HardysThe best of the poems about Emma fit no category, and his [Hardys] traditionalism obscures a kind of radical modernity, an outlook that pierced through Victorian pieties to see the bedrock truth of an actual marriage&He followed no Modernist doctrine, yet could be said to be more forward-looking than many of those who did.Often lost in the abundance of Hardys larger collections, these poems about Emma deserve their own space. In this little jewel-box of a book they have found it.Thomas Hardys famous sequence of love poems, published as a book for the first time.