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From the NS archive: Cobwebs on Hardy 16 May 1942: Would Thomas Hardy have been one of the great English poets?
By Stephen Spender
In this review of Edmund Blunden’s new biography of Thomas Hardy, Stephen Spender questions the author’s method. Blunden tracks the reception of Hardy’s work, taking the approach “of a guide book”. Spender is convinced by the biography that Hardy’s life was boring and uneventful but its examination of Hardy’s under-explored poetry redeems the account of this great writer’s life. Mr Blunden remarks, in his account of Thomas Hardy’s death, on the inevitable irony of circumstance by which his corpse was cut open, the heart being buried in Stinsford Churchyard, the body in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps a similar irony hangs over this book, which reads at times like an obituary notice in the