Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1909. It includes poems of various dates,[1] mainly concerned with rural, familial and provincial life.[2]
The collection contains poems of various dates, with almost a third of its 94 poems having been published before the book's publication.[3] A not untypical thematic stress on life's ironies is present,[4] though Hardy himself was insistent that the title phrase was a poetic image only, and not to be taken as a philosophical belief.[5] He also pointed out that behind the "I" of the poems stood not autobiography so much as "dramatic monologues by different characters".[6]
Hardy himself considered "A Trampwoman's Tragedy" the best of all his poems.[7] Gilbert Murray thought "He Abjures Love" had a Horatian quality; and Ezra Pound saw "The Revisitation" as anticipating Hardy's Poems 1912-13.[8]