Wessex Poems and Other Verses Wessex Poems and Other Verses Wessex Poems and Other Verses (often referred to simply as "Wessex Poems") is a collection of fifty-one poems set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape by English writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in 1898 by New York: Harper, , and contained a number of illustrations by the author himself. The collection met a broadly hostile reception, critics being accustomed to Hardy as a (controversial) writer of prose alone. Hardy himself was taken aback by the failure to recognise his dry humour, as in the (slightly bawdy) 'Bride-Night Fire'. On a more personal
Wessex their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called "Christminster", was visited as part of Wessex in "Jude the Obscure". He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex". The film "Shakespeare in Love" included a character called "Lord Wessex" – a title which did not exist in Elizabethan times. The ITV television series "Broadchurch" takes place in the Wessex area, primarily the county of