Distringuished as both a great novelist & a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose & then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric & the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance & tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.