'Now there is a clarity. There is the harvest of having written 20 novels first'. - Ezra Pound. The essays collected here range widely over Hardy's career as both a novelist and a lyric poet. They offer fresh reading of individual works - including his last novel, The Well-Beloved , and his first collection of verse, Wessex Poems - as well as exploring such central topics as the nature of storytelling, and the relations between poetry and song. Challenging, lucid and accessible, these essays provide new insight into the achievement of Thomas Hardy.