Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Let me tell you a little story. Many

years ago I was invited to a New Year's Eve party at the home of Richard Wilson, famous

actor, star of one foot in the drive. No, I know you don't believe it, he didn't either.

Anyway, it came to midnight and a lady next to me just grabbed me for New Year's kissing

and I realised it was Julie Christie, the actress, and then another actor Alan Bates came over

and did a very strange wink at my girlfriend of the time from about 18 inches away. What do these two

actors have in common, Christie and Bates? Well, I'll tell you, they played Beth Sheba Everdeen

and Gabriel Oake in the film Far From The Mad in Crow. So we were brought together that night

by Thomas Hardy, the man who wrote that novel and who wrote several fabulous novels that I

started during what I like to call my first degree. However, in 1896 when Julie Obscua was

published, Hardy got a bit of stick for its twisted morality and so he gave up on novels and turned

to poetry. Now that could have been a disaster. Canada great champion of prose, right? The delicate,

beautiful fragile flowers that are poetry. The answer, a resounding yes, only yeses resound,

by the way. I don't know what I do. Anyway, so he wrote poetry and his first collection came out

in 1898 and in the end he published about 900 poems. I know, but you know what, I love them,

love them, love them. They are little unusual creatures. That's what I think. A writer called

The Irving Howe said and I think this is very pertinent. Any critic can and often does see all that

is wrong with Hardy's poetry, but whatever it was that makes for his strange greatness is harder

to describe. And I think when you first read Hardy's poetry in this happened to me, you do think,

what's this? But pretty soon if you persevere, it starts to creep into your in a most parts.

I'm going to go straight into one, although I should probably say that they have a tremendous

variety of form, all sorts of uses of rhythm and rhyme and different length of lines.

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