Blog on , Thomas Hardy
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44329/the-man-he-killed
The Man He Killed
---- BY THOMAS HARDY
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
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https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6100556
GCSE 2019- OCR English Literature
GCSE EXAM DISCUSSION 2019
Zafirahhh_
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1 year ago
#4
Romeo and Juliet wasn’t that hard ...I think it was how their love is portrayed ? Inspector calls was about Eva smith .
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perplexed turtle
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1 year ago
#5
(Original post by Zafirahhh_)
Romeo and Juliet wasn’t that hard ...I think it was how their love is portrayed ? Inspector calls was about Eva smith .
Thank you so much. I wasn't expecting Inspector Calls to be Eva Smith related.
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Zafirahhh_
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1 year ago
#6
It’s okay ... it’s an easy one . My brother told me as I’m doing it in December . Romeo and Juliet’s question is “how is love presented in Romeo and Juliet ?”
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Davy611
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1 year ago
#7
The set poem was 'The Man He Killed' and it was compared with 'Courage of Youth, Battle of Ypres, Flanders Field (A Tribute)' by Robert Lindley.
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perplexed turtle
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1 year ago
#8
(Original post by Davy611)
The set poem was 'The Man He Killed' and it was compared with 'Courage of Youth, Battle of Ypres, Flanders Field (A Tribute)' by Robert Lindley.
thank you- the man he killed is calm
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faery18!
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1 week ago
#9
What was the merchant of venice question ? Im in year 10 and find it the most difficult so i want to practice
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https://poets.org/poet/thomas-hardy
Thomas Hardy
1840–1928
Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.
Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication. He left fiction writing for poetry and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).
Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with a variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased during the course of the century, offering a more down-to-earth, less rhetorical alternative to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of Yeats. Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1928.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1920)
Moments of Vision (Macmillan, 1917)
Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1916)
Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914)
Time's Laughingstocks (Macmillan, 1909)
The Dynasts (Macmillan, 1904)
Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902)
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A few great poems of this great poet:
Thomas Hardy
TITLE AUTHOR YEAR
The Voice
Thomas Hardy
1914
The Ruined Maid
Thomas Hardy
1900
The Convergence of the Twain
Thomas Hardy
1914
Channel Firing
Thomas Hardy
1913
The Subalterns
Thomas Hardy
1901
Afterwards
Thomas Hardy
1916
Hap
Thomas Hardy
1897
The Going
Thomas Hardy
1913
The Oxen
Thomas Hardy
1914
The Man He Killed
Thomas Hardy
1901
How Great My Grief
Thomas Hardy
1900
At the Entering of the New Year
Thomas Hardy
1919
During Wind and Rain
Thomas Hardy
1916
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy
Thomas Hardy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other people named Thomas Hardy, see Thomas Hardy (disambiguation).
Thomas Hardy
Born 2 June 1840
Stinsford, Dorset, England
Died 11 January 1928 (aged 87)
Dorchester, Dorset, England
Resting place
Stinsford parish church (heart)
Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey (ashes)
Occupation Novelist, poet, and short story writer
Alma mater King's College London
Literary movement Naturalism, Victorian literature
Notable works Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Far from the Madding Crowd
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Collected Poems
Jude the Obscure
Spouse
Emma Gifford
(married 1874–1912)
Florence Dugdale
(married 1914–1928)
Signature
Thomas Hardy OM (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 Wordsworth.[1] He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.[2]
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.[3]
Early life
"The Hardy Tree", a Great Tree of London in Old St Pancras churchyard in London, growing between gravestones moved while Hardy was working there
Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton (then Upper Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, where his father Thomas (1811–1892) worked as a stonemason and local builder, and married his mother Jemima (née Hand;[4] 1813–1904) in Beaminster, towards the end of 1839.[5] Jemima was well-read, and she educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at the age of eight. For several years he attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential.[6] Because Hardy's family lacked the means for a university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect.[7]
Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He joined Arthur Blomfield's practice as assistant architect in April 1862 and worked with Blomfield on All Saints' parish church in Windsor, Berkshire in 1862–64. A reredos, possibly designed by Hardy, was discovered behind panelling at All Saints' in August 2016.[8][9] In the mid-1860s, Hardy was in charge of the excavation of part of the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church prior to its destruction when the Midland Railway was extended to a new terminus at St Pancras.[10]
Hardy never felt at home in London, because he was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. During this time he became interested in social reform and the works of John Stuart Mill. He was introduced by his Dorset friend Horace Moule to the works of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. Mill's essay On Liberty was one of Hardy's cures for despair, and in 1924 he declared that "my pages show harmony of view with" Mill.[11] He was also attracted to Matthew Arnold's and Leslie Stephen's ideal of the urbane liberal freethinker.[12]
After five years, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset, settling in Weymouth, and decided to dedicate himself to writing.
Marriage and novel writing
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall,[13] Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in late 1874.[5][14][15] renting St David's Villa, Southborough (now Surbiton) for a year. In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate, a house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him and after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship; his Poems 1912–13 reflect upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. He remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry. In his later years, he kept a Wire Fox Terrier named Wessex, who was notoriously ill-tempered. Wessex's grave stone can be found on the Max Gate grounds.[16][17] In 1910, Hardy had been appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was also for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was nominated again for the prize 11 years later.[18][19]
Final years
Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by First World War, pondering that "I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving" and "better to let western 'civilization' perish, and let the black and yellow races have a chance."[20] He wrote to John Galsworthy that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world."[20]
Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after 9 pm on 11 January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed; the cause of death was cited, on his death certificate, as "cardiac syncope", with "old age" given as a contributory factor. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. His family and friends concurred; however, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.[21] Hardy's estate at death was valued at £95,418 (equivalent to £5,800,000 in 2019).[22]
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks, but twelve notebooks survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s, and research into these has provided insight into how Hardy used them in his works.[23] In the year of his death Mrs Hardy published The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891, compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years.
Hardy's work was admired by many younger writers, including D. H. Lawrence,[24] John Cowper Powys, and Virginia Woolf.[25] In his autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), Robert Graves recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s and how Hardy received him and his new wife warmly, and was encouraging about his work.
Poetry
Thomas Hardy by Walter William Ouless, 1922
In 1898, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. While some suggest that Hardy gave up writing novels following the harsh criticism of Jude the Obscure in 1896, the poet C. H. Sisson calls this "hypothesis" "superficial and absurd".[33][37] In the twentieth century Hardy published only poetry.
Thomas Hardy wrote in a great variety of poetic forms, including lyrics, ballads, satire, dramatic monologues, and dialogue, as well as a three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts (1904–08),[38] and though in some ways a very traditional poet, because he was influenced by folksong and ballads,[39] he "was never conventional," and "persistently experiment[ed] with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres,[40] and made use of "rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction".[41]
Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", and "The Man He Killed"; his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.[42] Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech.[42] A theme in the Wessex Poems is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the 19th century, as seen, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig".[43] The Napoleonic War is the subject of The Dynasts.
Some of Hardy's more famous poems are from "Poems of 1912–13", part of Satires of Circumstance (1914), written following the death of his wife Emma in 1912. They had been estranged for 20 years, and these lyric poems express deeply felt "regret and remorse".[42] Poems like "After a Journey", "The Voice", and others from this collection "are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement".[38] In a recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet after the death of his first wife Emma, beginning with these elegies, which she describes as among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry."[44]
Many of Hardy's poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and "the perversity of fate", but the best of them present these themes with "a carefully controlled elegiac feeling".[45] Irony is an important element in a number of Hardy's poems, including "The Man he Killed" and "Are You Digging on My Grave".[46] A few of Hardy's poems, such as "The Blinded Bird", a melancholy polemic against the sport of vinkenzetting, reflect his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.[47]
A number of notable English composers, including Gerald Finzi,[48][49] Benjamin Britten,[50] Jane Sinclair Wells, and Gustav Holst,[51] set poems by Hardy to music. Holst also wrote the orchestral tone poem Egdon Heath: A Homage to Thomas Hardy in 1927.
Although his poems were initially not as well received as his novels had been, Hardy is now recognised as one of the great poets of the 20th century, and his verse had a profound influence on later writers, including Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin.[41] Larkin included 27 poems by Hardy compared with only nine by T. S. Eliot in his edition of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse in 1973.[52] There were fewer poems by W. B. Yeats.[53]