Every bereavement is a kind of ghost story. When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, her loss unstoppered a flood of poetry in Hardy.

Every bereavement is a kind of ghost story. When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, her loss unstoppered a flood of poetry in Hardy. Taken together, his poems about Emma constitute one of the greatest series of elegies in English, a complex exploration of nostalgia, regret, self-recrimination, self-mythologising, bitterness and yearning. They are the record of a haunting. Which all came as a most unpleasant irony to the second Mrs Hardy …

Working with the poet Mark Ford, whose book examining Hardy’s Emma poems, Women Much Missed, is published by OUP this July, Dead Poets Live return to Wilton’s this November with a ghost story which is also a love story – a dramatization of a poet haunted into his greatest work.

Tickets £12.50–£26 (full price) | £10–£23.50 (concessions)

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