Collected Poems

by E.P. Thompson

To many, E.P. Thompson is the writer of the Cold War, the outstanding voice of heart and reason, crying out against the obscenity and unreason of the war. One of Britain's leading Marxist historians, he re-wrote our concept of history in The Making of the English Working Class, and made major contributions to political protest in such works as The Poverty of Theory, Writing by Candlelight, and Protest and Survive. His poetry has been overshadowed by the political writings, yet they exhibit the same incisive and spellbinding qualities. In the poems, Thompson's vision encompasses tenderness and sardonic anger, rage and hatred, epic grandeur and grand wit. For Thompson, as for T.S Eliot, the language of history and the language of politics were one and the same. His poetry too, renews old speech to keep it speakable.

128 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1998

About the author

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, marxist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition," calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.