A novelist and poet, Hardy was one of the 19th century’s great English writers. Though he started out writing poetry and regarded the novel as an inferior genre, his first published works were novels, and it was through them that he gained fame as a writer. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are considered his masterpieces. At the height of his success, Hardy gave up writing novels and began publishing poetry. What compelled him to finally make the change? Discuss