Selected Poems and Prose

by Edward Thomas, David Wright (Editor), Robert Macfarlane (Foreword)

Fired by his abiding love of the English landscape, the poetry of Edward Thomas is some of the most astonishing of the twentieth century. A journalist, essayist and critic for many years, he was encouraged to write verse by his friend Robert Frost. He produced a late outburst of poetry of extraordinary beauty and mystery about the subjects closest to his heart: rural England and its inhabitants, landscape, atmosphere, transience, endurance and death. By 1917, when he was killed on the Western Front, he had earned his place as one of England's most valued poets. This selection brings together his finest verse with his most vivid prose writings on the countryside.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Nature

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2013

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Philip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh writer of prose and poetry. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Already an accomplished writer, Thomas turned to poetry only in 1914. He enlisted in the army in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

His Works:

Poetry collections:

Six Poems, under pseudonym Edward Eastaway, Pear Tree Press, 1916.
Poems, Holt, 1917.
Last Poems, Selwyn & Blount, 1918.
Collected Poems, Selwyn & Blount, 1920.
Two Poems, Ingpen & Grant, 1927.
The Poems of Edward Thomas, R. George Thomas (ed), Oxford University Press, 1978
Poemoj (Esperanto translation), Kris Long (ed & pub), Burleigh Print, Bracknell, Berks, 1979.
Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England, Elaine Wilson (ed), Paul & Co., 1985.
The Poems of Edward Thomas, Peter Sacks (ed), Handsel Books, 2003.
The Annotated Collected Poems, Edna Longley (ed), Bloodaxe Books, 2008.

Fiction:

The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (novel), 1913

Essay collections:

Horae Solitariae, Dutton, 1902.
Oxford, A & C Black, 1903.
Beautiful Wales, Black, 1905.
The Heart of England, Dutton, 1906.
The South Country, Dutton, 1906 (reissued by Tuttle, 1993).
Rest and Unrest, Dutton, 1910.
Light and Twilight, Duckworth, 1911.
The Last Sheaf, Cape, 1928.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

I read, under the strictest compulsion, in other words for school exams Edward Thomas's poetry when I was seventeen and or eighteen - I can't be sure any more if only in one year or over both but he was on the syllabus along with The Playboy of the western World, to the Lighthouse and Edwin Muir's autobiography...oh and A handful of Dust too. I can't say that I have any special memories of reading him in class, in a mostly empty room , there were five or six of us with one teacher, all the windows were on the right hand side, the door on the left, the teacher an Irish woman with an extravagant surname courtesy of her husband.

Thomas she taught us had a spell of madness, before some years later going off and dying in the first world war, which may qualify him in part as one of the war poets. She didn't teach us that he was in an emotional ménage a Trois - it was a decent and upstanding kind of school, not one to encourage improper relations, or possibly a ménage a quatre, if you include Robert Frost, who came over to England and was much encouraged by Thomas in his versifying, the poem The Road not taken apparently relates to their conversations about the war, Thomas' response was to join up, he died in 1917.

I was attracted to this volume because I recalled he started writing poetry quite late in life. He earned a living and supported a family, plus additional persons by reviewing books (a dream perhaps of many a Goodreader if so beware, be careful what you wish for and call no man happy until he dies because Thomas was deeply miserable) and writing other prose particularly about walking in the south of England (The South County).

Truly the selection in this volume was a revelation , or maybe advances an agenda, that Thomas was very Welsh (he writes of his like-hate relationship with his welsh grandmother, detesting her conservatism as of the reign of George IV) , that experience shaped his prose which in turn became his verse, reading the prose fragments I felt in conversation or observations he made how close they were and that they were on the verge of becoming his later poetry, and finally just how depressive he was all the way through. I felt ultimately that maybe he had enlisted as a form of playing Russian roulette. Just to share a couple of examples:

I must believe in myself or forget myself and I cannot. I get more and more self-conscious every day - of the little good in myself and work - of the much bad - of the futility of reviewing - of my insolence in Reviewing any book - of my way of doing things - my way of speaking - my very attitudes, dress, expression - Shall I ever have the relief of true and through insanity? (p.27) (1905)

I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without . Once there was summer, and a great heat and splendour over the earth terrified me and asked me what I could show that was worthy of such an earth. It smote me and humiliated me... (p.91) (1911)

In some of the prose there are stories of 'meeting' men and having 'conversations' with them, one a clerk of welsh ancestry who ran away from an office job in a windowless vault to tramp the countryside as a casual labourer, sleeping under trees. Another was a professional book reviewer who grows withdrawn and morose from wife, children, the whole of existence. Such encounters struck me as encounters with versions of himself. In another Thomas meets a man who once owned a dream house - with views over 60 miles of the south downs (there were far less trees then than there are today, a legacy of the first world war which convinced British statesman that in order to fight future world wars that the country would need far more trees) and grew to hate it, the clouds left him feeling cut off, while the garden's soil of clay and flint broke his back manure is what he needed and lots of it.

Starting on the poetry which makes up the second half of the volume I felt the presence of same themes: death, alienation, inability to appreciate the present moment, loss, decay, dissatisfaction, all this before he goes to war.

I had the feeling of a deeply fortunate man who was deeply unhappy. Not somebody to read when you are in need of a pick me up, but I am lucky because I have a nice book about reindeer to turn to next.

There was one strikingly lively piece prose and that about the outbreak of the first world war and the swirls of rumours about in the country of the Russians with snow on their boots, of companies firing young men to 'encourage' them to enlist, that the Germans would chop off women's hands and burn down the Forest of Dean which reminded me of the stories told by the Kuwati ambassador's daughter in the USA in the early days of the first Gulf war which were lapped up and widely reported at the time.

Thomas emerges as more clear sighted and less distracted by such tall stories, but his running off to war leaving a wife, small children and another woman who was also in love with him reminded me of an exhibition I saw about a charity which transplanted inner cities boys from London to Canadian farms, it was striking to see those of them who as soon as they could enlisted to serve in France, it says something about a person's heart and mind when they think that the best thing they can do with their life is to risk loosing it in the pursuit of depriving others of theirs.

[Katherine Blyth]

Rain rain midnight rain 😭

[Aseem Kaul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am almost ashamed to admit that until a few months ago I had barely heard of Edward Thomas, let alone read any of his work. Ashamed, because 35 is really too old to be discovering a major poet for the first time (though I suppose there is something to be said for starting to read a poet at the age when he first began writing). Ashamed, but also delighted, because reading and re-reading these poems over the last week has afforded me the kind of breathless rush of discovery that I get to experience very rarely now.

What stands out for me, reading these poems, is the poet's voice - a voice at once unique and familiar, at once murmuring and resonant, full-bodied and acute, the voice of a solitary figure standing on the margin between the modern world and the world of nature, a voice of wonder without innocence, knowing and clear-eyed. It is a voice that harks back to Wordsworth and Clare, to Arnold and Browning, even as the echoes of it can be heard in Auden and Hughes, Larkin and Heaney. Which is all to say that it is a strain native and true to English poetry, and that these poems--written in a brief period of two years between the time Thomas began to write poetry and the time he was killed in the First World War--firmly establish his place in that tradition.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark hedges and hills, wild dreams and winds, half-held memories and tender, broken solitudes.

Pair with Robert Macfarlane’s 2012 lecture about thinking with and through landscape, how “paths run through people as surely as they run through places,” and how “landscape gives us ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves”—
https://youtu.be/5q1IK-O5Ypg?si=r9syd...

Over the Hills (165)

“Often and often it came back again
To mind, the day I passed the horizon ridge
To a new country, the path I had to find
By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge,
The pack of scarlet clouds running across
The harvest evening that seemed endless then
And after, and the inn where all were kind,
All were strangers. I did not know my loss
Till one day twelve months later suddenly
I leaned upon my spade and saw it all,
Though far beyond the sky-line. It became
Almost a habit through the year for me
To lean and see it and think to do the same
Again for two days and a night. Recall
Was vain: no more could the restless brook
Ever turn back and climb the waterfall
To the lake that rests and stirs not in its nook,
As in the hollow of the collar-bone
Under the mountain’s head of rush and stone.”

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, no wonder he is considered one of England’s greatest poets. Beautiful writing in prose, criticism and poetry.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not heard of Edward Thomas, but I am becoming a fan. He died in battle during the Great War. British writer, poetry and prose. A friend of Robert Frost, but a harder read. He has inspired me to try my hand at a bit of verse.