Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy wrote some of the great Victorian novels — Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd — then quit fiction entirely after the moral outrage that greeted Jude the Obscure in 1895. He spent his last thirty years writing nearly a thousand poems, and many readers now think the poetry is the better half of his work.

"The Darkling Thrush," dated 31 December 1900, finds one frail bird singing "of joy illimited" over the corpse of the nineteenth century — hope offered by a poet who refuses to quite believe in it.

When he died, the nation claimed his ashes for Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his own wish, was buried in the Dorset churchyard at Stinsford, among his people.