LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER: With Many Other Verses.

First edition, first printing. Original green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, with a decorative roundel featuring the author's initials stamped in gilt to the front panel, in the buff dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A few small marks to the cloth at the rear. All edges untrimmed with light spotting to the fore-edge and some offsetting to the endpapers. Complete with the good rubbed and nicked dustwrapper, split in entirety to the upper fold of the somewhat darkened and lightly chipped spine. Priced 7/6 net to the spine. A sound copy of Hardy's sixth collection of poems.

'Late Lyrics and Earlier' contains, as its title suggests, poems dating from as early as 1866 and as recently as 1921. The volume opens with Hardy's fascinating, and distinctly downbeat, prose 'Apology' in which he outlines "the barbarizing of taste in [...] younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, "a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote Wordsworth [...])", all of which "threaten [...] a new Dark Age." The collection was issued the same year as Eliot's 'The Waste Land', a poem approaching a similar view of the world very differently – Eliot's appeal to forms of authoritarian, and later religious, culture at odds with Hardy's brand of scientific humanism (and atheism). The volume includes poems in memory of the poet's sister, Mary, poems concerning his late first wife, Emma, and two poems marking the centenary of Keats' 'Poems' of 1820. Published in an edition of 3250 copies on 23 May 1922, two reprints appeared before the end of the year. (Purdy, pp. 214-27)