This paper discusses the importance of landscape in poetry. Thomas Hardy was one poet who used landscape particularly effectively, but not "landscape" in the sense of rolling hills and mountains, but more the landscape of society within the Victorian period during which he lived. Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his Dorsetshire, England home. Hardy's use of landscape if demonstrated in the two poems, which I will analyze in the following, pages, "The Convergence of the Twain" and "The Ruined Maid".