Information for Dead Poet Live - The Haunter - Thomas Hardy/Emma Hardy & Florence Dugdale at The Coronet, Inner London (Poetry). 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 the most original, strangest and arguably the greatest series of elegies in English poetry, a complex exploration of nostalgia, regret, self-recrimination, self-mythologising, immense pain and yearning. They are the record of a haunting.