English poet and novelist. Born in Dorset as son of a stone-mason, young Hardy was taught the violin by his father, and was encouraged to read books by his mother. At 16 he was apprenticed to a local architect, later moving to London, and returning home to continue architectural work.

With the success of his fourth novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy gave up architecture for writing, and he has since remained a popular novelist of the Victorian Age. However, his 'pessimism' and 'immorality' to be found in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) received bitter and hostile reviews, and Hardy gave up the writing of fiction to concentrate on poetry. He left over 900 poems in eight collections including Wessex Poems (1898). While Hardy followed William Wordsworth and Robert Browning in writing verse in the language of daily speech, he experimented constantly with rhyme and other verse forms. Today, Hardy is highly appraised as the 'father of modern poetry'. Hardy is one of the poets who left an exceptionally large number of literary ballads, the others being A. C. Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling. Here again, Hardy experimented variously with the subject matters and narrative techniques of the traditional ballad. The rural characters in Hardy's novels sang the ballads current in Dorset. Hardy originally intended to write in ballad stanza his epic-drama of the war with Napoleon, The Dynasts (1904,1906, 1908).   (M. Y.)

1. "Ah, Are You Digging on my Grave?"

2. At Shag's Heath

3. The Ballad of Love's Skeleton

4. The Brother

5. The Catching Ballet of the Wedding Clothes

6. The Dance at the Phœnix

7. The Dark-Eyed Gentleman

8. The Dead and the Living One

9. The Forbidden Banns

10. The Harvest Supper

11. Her Immortality

12. In the Days of Crinoline

13. Leipzig

14. The Lost Pyx

15. The Mock Wife

16. The Moth-Signal

17. No Bell-Ringing

18. The Pair He Saw Pass

19. The Peasant's Confession

20. A Practical Woman

21. The Rash Bride

22. The Revisitation

23. The Ruined Maid

24. The Sacrilege

25. San Sebastian

26. The Satin Shoes

27. The Second Night

28. The Slow Nature

29. A Sunday Morning Tragedy

30. The Supplanter

31. A Trampwoman's Tragedy

32. Valenciennes

33. The Vampirine Fair

34. The Well-Beloved

35. The Widow Betrothed

36. The Workbox