Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses

Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1909. It includes poems of various dates,[1] mainly concerned with rural, familial and provincial life.[2]

Dates and thematics

The collection contains poems of various dates, with almost a third of its 94 poems having been published before the books publication.[3] A not untypical thematic stress on life's ironies is present,[4] though Hardy himself was insistent that the title phrase was a poetic image only, and not to be taken as a philosophical belief.[5] He also pointed out that behind the "I" of the poems stood not autobiography so much as "dramatic monologues by different characters".[6]

Significant poems

Hardy himself considered "A Trampwoman's Tragedy" the best of all his poems.[7] Gilbert Murray thought "He Abjures Love" had a Horatian quality; and Ezra Pound saw "The Revisitation" as anticipating Hardy's Poems 1912-13.[8]

See also

References
  1. D. Wright ed., Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin 1978) p. 442
  2. I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge 1993) p. 943
  3. N. Wenborn, Reading Thomas Hardy (2012) p. 52
  4. I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge 1993) p. 943
  5. T. & F. Hardy, Thomas Hardy (Ware 2007) p. 419-20
  6. D. Wright ed., Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin 1978) p. 442
  7. I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge 1993) p. 943
  8. M. Seymour-Smith, Thomas Hardy (London 1994) p. 307 and p. 682


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