Thomas Hardy abandoned the novel form at the turn of the century, probably after public reaction toJude the Obscure, but continued to write verse displaying a wide variety of metrical styles and stanza forms and a broad scope of tone and attitude. This definitive volume contains selections from his numerous collections published between 1898 and 1928.
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Thomas Hardy's "Studies, Specimens &c." notebook, dating from the mid-1860s, preserves unique evidence of the studies of other writers and the self-assigned exercises in vocabulary-building and poetic techniques by which he so deliberately sought to make himself into a poet at the very beginning of his literary career. This edition presents the manuscript in quasi-facsimile, with full annotation of Hardy's sources, allusions, and intentions, as far as they can be interpreted.

An annotated edition of a previously unpublished and almost unknown Hardy notebook, one of the very few to have survived. Biographically significant because of its preservation of personal notes from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, 'Poetical Matter' is a unique late working notebook devoted to verse.