Hardy is one of the great English poets, but you can list the poems you would want to keep in very short order, and they form a tiny proportion of the 800+ pages of the collected poems. They do not include 'Channel Firing' or 'The Darkling Thrush', so often anthologized. They are:

Neutral Tones, In the Time of the Breaking of Nations, The Self Unseeing, When I set out for Lyonesse, The Five Students, Lines Written to Mozart's E-Flat Symphony, Rain on a Grave, I Found Her Out There, After a Journey, At Castle Botterel, Beeny Cliff, Afterwards.

You might want to include one or two others from the 1912-13 poems.

How did it happen?

Hardy was the voice of an old rural England, in which viols played in church and the language of the Pilgrim's Progress and the Authorized Version were still not far from ordinary speech. It was also the country of workhouses, whose remains, whether as museums or ruins, are to be found all over the countryside of the South - though you have to look for them - of occasional rick burnings and riots. It was a country of servants, of great landowners, small market towns, desperately poor agricultural wages, tied cottages, small fields with hedges, horse transport, and a culture of restraint and emigration to the growing industrial cities and to the colonies. Coarse wheat bread was the staple. From time to time the recruiting sergeant passed through, and enlisted men who, dressed in red coats, drilled, and went out to the colonies to shoot tribesmen armed with spears. Long ago, disastrously, they had been sent to the Crimea, where they proved themselves to be 'steady', as they had against Napoleon. Agriculture had not mechanised. People had lived there for generations.

Relics of it persist. You will still find in remoter English villages grown men working the land who have never left the county in which they were born. Hardy left it, wanted to leave it, became a respectable author and London clubman, and a national figure. But at some level, he remained a countryman.

For the most part this rural England vanished. along with a large part of the male population, in the first World War. As Flora Thompson says, they did not flinch, and as she does not say, they were comprehensively betrayed. You can see the silent testimony to the betrayal in the plaques to 'the fallen' in every village church.

Hardy mostly wrote for himself in his own voice, and when he did so, the results are unremarkable, of some historical interest, charming or amusing in novel form, but don't command the intense attention of an adult reader today. There were times however when Hardy, under pressure of feeling, spoke in the language of his tradition. It is not at all the language of Victorian poeticising. It is not Tennyson, or Swinburne, or anything like it. Its not Georgian. Its not exactly modern, but it is ordinary speech intensified. Its a small, pure spring, unlike anything else recent in English, and not like anything in any other language I know. Its a singing voice, but not the singing voice of folk songs or ballads, but of the church viol. Its deep feeling, but expressed with gravity and detachment. We are as far from Sylvia Plath, psychotherapy, expressing your feelings, Esalen, and Princess Diana as you can imagine. This is a lost England.

Pound had it wrong. This was not the harvest of having written 20 novels. This was the harvest of having written 800 pages of verse, so that when the moment came, the pen was ready, and he could take dictation.

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.