Satires of Circumstance is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1914. It includes the 18 poem sequence Poems 1912-13 on the death of Hardy’s wife Emma – extended to the now-classic 21 poems in Collected Poems of 1919 – widely regarded to comprise the best work of his poetic career.
The collection’s title was picked by the publisher, and disapproved of by Hardy, emphasising as it did the 15 light-hearted satires and sketches of 1910, at the expense of the Poems of 1912-13 themselves, as well as of the 39 Miscellaneous Lyrics and the 34 Lyrics and Reveries, all with their more serious side.[2] These latter include such fine examples of philosophical meditation and contemporary observation as ‘Wessex Heights’ and ‘Channel Firing’.