But, as Neil Wenborn points out in Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems, their “stances could hardly be more different”. Reading his poetry on his terrain, perhaps in ‘Hardy’ font, affords an understanding of why Hardy thought prose was an inferior formThere were several interesting things that I did not know about Thomas Hardy when I went for a wander around Casterbridge — Dorchester in southwest England, to you and me — on his 176th birthday last week. In the final stanza Hardy has the soldier speaking about the folly of war: Yes; quaint and curious war is! I did not know Hardy made a remarkably quiet entry into this world by way of the middle bedroom in a thatched cottage — so quiet, in fact, that he was considered stillborn. Rather, the anti-war sentiments in his war poetry.

Source: The Hindu June 11, 2016 19:30 UTC