Edward Thomas

Philip Edward Thomas
Born	3 March 1878(1878-03-03) London Borough of Lambeth
Died	9 April 1917 (aged 39) Pas-de-Calais, France
Pen name	Edward Thomas, Edward Eastaway
Occupation	Journalist and poet
Nationality	British
Genres	War poetry

Philip Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917) was an Anglo-Welsh poet and journalist. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. An accomplished writer, Thomas only turned to poetry under the stress of whether or not to enlist in the army to fight in World War I during the autumn of 1914.

Thomas enlisted in the army in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

Early life

Thomas was born in Lambeth, London. He was educated at Battersea Grammar School, St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His family were Welsh. Unusually, he married while still an undergraduate and determined to live his life by the pen. He then worked as a book reviewer, reviewing up to 15 books every week.^[1] He was already a seasoned writer before the outbreak of war having worked as literary critic at the Daily Chronicle, in London. It was while with the Daily Chronicle that he became a close friend of Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies whose career he almost single-handedly developed.^[2] From 1905 Thomas lived, with his wife Helen and their family, at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks, Kent. Thomas rented a tiny nearby cottage for Davies and nurtured his writing as best he could. On one occasion Thomas even had to arrange for the manufacture, by a local wheelwright, of a makeshift wooden leg for Davies.

Even though Thomas thought that poetry was the highest form of literature and regularly reviewed it, he only became a full time poet under the pressure of choosing whether to enlist or not in World War I.^[1] Living at Steep, in East Hampshire, he initially published some poetry under the name Edward Eastaway. He also wrote a novel and some works of non-fiction.

By August 1914, the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire had become the residence of a number of literary figures including Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson and American poet Robert Frost. Edward Thomas was a visitor at this time.^[3]

The railway station at Adlestrop was immortalised by Thomas when his train made an unscheduled stop there shortly before the First World War.^[4]

War service

His memorial stone near Steep

Thomas enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting. He was promoted Corporal and in November 1916 was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was killed in action at Arras on 9 April 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

Close friend W. H. Davies was devastated by the death and his commemorative poem "Killed In Action (Edward Thomas)" was included in Davies's 1918 collection "Raptures".^[2]

Thomas is buried in the Military Cemetery at Agny in France (Row C, Grave 43).^[5] He is also commemorated in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, London and by memorial windows in the churches at Steep, and Eastbury, Berkshire.

Thomas was survived by his wife, Helen, his son Merfyn and his two daughters Bronwen and Myfanwy.

Family life

After the war, Helen wrote about her courtship and early married life with Edward in the autobiography, As it Was (1926); later she added a second volume, World Without End (1931). Their daughter, Myfanwy, claims the books were written by her mother as a form of therapy to help lift her out of a deep depression that she succumbed to following the death of Edward. My Memory of W. H. Davies was published in 1973. Under Storm's Wing was published in 1997 and is a collection of writings including the two earlier autobiographies along with various other writings and letters.

Poetry

Thomas's poems are noted for their attention to the English countryside and a certain colloquial style. A short poem of Thomas's serves as an example of how he blends war and countryside throughout his poetry:

In Memoriam

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

Edward Thomas's Collected Poems was one of Andrew Motion's ten picks for the poetry section of the "Guardian Essential Library" in October 2002.^[6]

In his 2002 novel Youth, J.M. Coetzee has his main character, intrigued by the survival of pre-modernist forms in British poetry, ask himself: "What happened to the ambitions of poets here in Britain? Have they not digested the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone for ever?"^[7] In contrast, Irish critic Edna Longley writes that Thomas's Lob, a 150-line poem, "strangely preempts The Waste Land through verses like: "This is tall Tom that bore / The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall / Once talked".^[8]

On 11 November 1985, Thomas was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.^[9] The inscription, written by fellow Great War poet Wilfred Owen, reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."^[10]

Literary output

Poems (selection)

• "The Unknown"
• "But These Things Also"
• "Tears"
• "The Lane"
• "And You, Helen"
• "This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong"
• "The Other"
• "As the team's head-brass"
• "March The Third"
• "Out In The Dark"
• "The New House"
• "When First"
• "Adlestrop"
• "Celandine"
• "The Manor Farm"
• "Melancholy"
• "A Private"
• "Tall Nettles"
• "When First I Came Here"
• "A Cat"
• "Gone, Gone Again"
• "Up In The Wind"
• "Rain"
• "The Owl"
• "Old Man"
• " 'Home' "

Poetry

• 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
• Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England, Elaine Wilson (ed), Paul & Co., 1985.
• The Poems of Edward Thomas, Peter Sacks (ed), Handsel Books, 2003.

Fiction

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

Essays

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

References in popular fiction

• In 1918, W. H. Davies published his poem Killed In Action (Edward Thomas) to mark the personal loss of his close friend and mentor.^[11]

• In his 1980 autobiography, Ways of Escape, Graham Greene references Thomas's poem "The Other" (about a man who seems to be following his own double from hotel to hotel) in describing his own experience of being bedeviled by an imposter.

• In his 1995 novel, Borrowed Time, the author Robert Goddard bases the home of the main character at Greenhayes in the village of Steep, where Thomas lived from 1913. Goddard weaves some of the feeling from Thomas's poems into the mood of the story and also uses some quotes from Thomas's works.

• Will Self's 2006 novel, The Book of Dave, has a quote from The South Country as the book's epigraph:

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers — as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edward Thomas (poet)

• The Edward Thomas Collection in The First World War Poetry Digital Archive by Oxford University contains images of Thomas' War poetry manuscripts, letters, war diary, plus a searchable full text corpora.
• Text of Thomas' poems
• Works by Edward Thomas at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Edward Thomas at the Internet Archive
• Edward Thomas' Grave
• Lost Poets of the Great War, a hypertext document on the poetry of World War I by Harry Rusche, of the English Department, Emory University, Atlanta GA. It contains a bibliography of related materials.
• The Edward Thomas Fellowship
• Dymock Poets Archive University of Gloucestershire Archives and Special Collections