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Edward Thomas
1878–1917
A man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply.
Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth in 1878. While still an undergraduate, he married Helen Noble and, with a young family to support, was obliged to make his living by his pen. His gifts were honed – and enslaved – on the Grub Street treadmill. He reviewed by the yard – up to fifteen books a week – and wrote some thirty books of his own: biographies, nature-and-travel writing, literary criticism, establishing himself as one of the foremost critics of his time.
It took Robert Frost – and a summer of walks in Gloucestershire in 1914 – to talk Thomas into writing poems himself. Into the next two years he crammed all his poetry, before, in April 1917, he was killed on the Western Front. His posthumous reputation has never ceased to grow. Speaking at Westminster Abbey in 1985, Ted Hughes called him ‘the father of us all.’
Edward Thomas had about lost patience with the minor poetry it was his business to review. It took me to tell him what the trouble was.
Curiosities
It was Robert Frost who saw the poetry in Thomas’s prose, as he would recall in 1925: ‘Right at that moment he was writing as good a poetry as anybody alive but in prose form where it didn’t declare itself and gain him recognition. I referred to the paragraphs here and there in such a book as The Pursuit of Spring and pointed them out.’
We think of him as a war poet but he wrote no poems in the theatre of war. We think of him as dying young, but he was 39. Rupert Brooke had been 27. Wilfred Owen would be 25. Compared with his fellow soldiers, Edward Thomas was old.
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