Dead Poets LiveThe Haunter – Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Florence

In 1912, Thomas Hardy was 72 and generally recognised as the pre-eminent English novelist of his time. His reputation as a poet – various, prolific, uncategorisable – was less certain. But the unexpected death of his wife of nearly forty years, Emma, released a flood of poems: nostalgic, bitter, self-recriminatory or regretful verse that, taken together, constitute one of the most complex explorations of love and bereavement English poetry has. All of which came as an unwelcome surprise to Florence, the second Mrs Hardy… Working with the poet Mark Ford, whose book on these poems, ‘Woman Much Missed’, is published by OUP this July, Dead Poets Live return to Wilton’s this November with a sort of ghost story told via some of the most haunting elegies ever written.