Thomas Hardy's 'Poetical Matter' Notebook

Thomas Hardy's 'Poetical Matter', the last notebook to be published from among the few not destroyed by Hardy himself or his executors, is currently known to survive only in the form of a microfilm made for Richard Little Purdy in 1952. But that microfilm, as recently photographed and digitized, has provided an excellent basis for the meticulously edited and fully annotated text now prepared by distinguished Hardy scholars Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. The edition importantly offers a rich and vivid demonstration of the ways in which Hardy, immensely creative even in his mid-eighties, worked persistently with ideas drawn from wide-ranging notes, both old and new, with prose outlines, with tentative verse forms, and then with actual drafts, towards the eventual production of so many of the poems gathered into the remarkable final volume, called Winter Words, that he did not quite live to see into print.