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The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas
Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be recognised as one of the great English poets of the 20th century. Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as a 'war poet', he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war, and whose main subjects were the English countryside and its people, and the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.
198 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1920
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About the author
Edward Thomas
380 books77 followersLibrarian 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
October 31, 2023
Edward Thomas was a wonderful poet who started writing poetry at the age of thirty-six and died tragically in the battle of Arras in 1917, aged thirty-nine. Often categorized as a war poet, his poems hardly allude to the War at all. They are mostly about birds, flowers, ruined cottages overrun by briar and bramble, walking, sleeping and dreaming. The poems are lyrical, never maudlin, beautiful as sunlight slanting through trees in a wood. They contain what can only be described as magical rhyming. Here is one of my favorites:
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
Fun fact: I work with Edward Thomas's great-grandniece, a lovely young lady.
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
Fun fact: I work with Edward Thomas's great-grandniece, a lovely young lady.
June 8, 2015
Two Pewits
Under the after-sunset sky
Two pewits sport and cry,
More white than is the moon on high
Riding the dark surge silently;
More black than earth. Their cry
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
Plunging earthward, tossing high,
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose ‘twixt earth and sky,
While the moon’s quarter silently
Rides, and earth rests as silently.
I had not heard of Edward Thomas until I saw notice of an event related to a new biography of him. The library had this edition of his poems with the full annotations of all variants and edits from available manuscripts, which I ignored for a first reading. Thomas was for many years a respected prose writer who supported himself taking on much ‘hack’ work, and who specialized in rural England. He didn’t start writing poetry until the beginning of WWI, at the encouragement of Robert Frost. Thomas enlisted in 1915 at the age of 37, went to France, and was killed in 1917 at the battle of Arras. Thus this Collected Poems consists of 144 works, plus some juvenalia in an appendix. There are also journal entries from 1917, up to his death in France.
These are fine, melancholy poems. They are both tributes to the beauty of the English countryside and a heartbroken goodbye to places ruined and delapidated. Over and over he revisits places that used to be vibrant, and that hosted human or natural lives and business, but that are now abandoned. He talks about what he would leave to his children if he could. There is next to no mention of battles or war; the tragedy is indirect.
The Poetry Foundation’s website says that in some ways his poetry resembles that of the Georgian poets of his time, but that 'Thomas's personalized voice and intensity of vision give his poetry an artistic force which the Georgians never approached.’ It also mentions that several eminent critics consider him one of the major 20th century English poets. The poems exhibit a range of forms, often rhymed and with a sophisticated use of enjambment that keeps the rhyme from overpowering the images and themes. I think both his technique and his art are quite fine, and worth searching out. The one habit which I found a drawback was that almost always when the poet actually encounters a human being in a poem, it drifts into a rather conventional narrative finish that detracts from the splendid lyric setup. However, I will finish from a poem that avoids that.
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
January 8, 2018
Edward Thomas Collected Poems
First, an apologia pro me: I must be honest, Thomas’s poems are a re-read, having lived with them ever since I can remember. But as part of this reading challenge I decided to do something I have never done hitherto and read them as a body of work, not as individual pieces. The results were surprising and revealing. It opened my eyes to the thematic preoccupations which intrigued Thomas throughout his life.
Thomas’s poetry has received much attention in recent years with writers such as Robert Macfarlane bringing his work to wider attention. Thomas, like Macfarlane is today, was an inveterate walker and much of his output was born of his epic walks around England. The pulse of walking runs through his writing like a heartbeat; it is the life force of his art.
To understand Thomas’s poetry, we should first recognise that it represents only the last three years of what was a prolific, if short, life as a prose writer. By the time he came to write his first stanza he was already the author of several masterpieces, ‘In Search of Spring’, ‘The Icknield Way’ and ‘The South Country’, inter alia. Above all, these works established him as a writer of rural life, of its people and its places. It was Robert Frost who suggested that Thomas’s elegiac prose style would lend itself admirably to poetry, and so late in 1914 he published his first set of verses, initially under the name Edward Eastaway. He was perhaps both easily persuaded and daunted in equal measure, as he always considered poetry to be the highest form of literature. Thomas is, of course, revered as a war poet alongside Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Brooke and many others. But even in this grave subject it is his close connection with the countryside and his feeling for its past that make his poetry stand apart. Whereas Owen sighed that ‘all a poet can do today is warn’, Thomas both warns and crucially remembers the effect of war far from the battlefield itself.
Thus remembrance and loss; these words are the refrain that are absorbed into one’s psyche time and time again when reading Thomas. Writing prose about the countryside had taught him close observation and a sense of the subtle changes, both seasonal and evolutional, that all rural landscapes undergo. These changes inevitably give rise to the feelings of memory and the passing of all matter. Even in ‘In Memoriam’ (Easter, 1915) the loss of men in war is related to the memory of their presence in a rural idyll:
'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.'
And, away from conflict, the simple transience of life in nature, in ‘First Known when Lost’:
'I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone, - the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill
It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as bone,'
Throughout Thomas crystallizes his recollection with moments in the year’s seasonal cycle as in ‘The Word’, ‘I am content/With the wild rose scent that is like memory’ ... ‘The Path’, ‘The Combe’ and ‘The Manor Farm’ and many other poems shaped by the memory of what has been but will be again. So outwardly Thomas's concern with memory is a reading of the landscape gleaned not from stasis but a natural dynamic – birth, death and life. The wild rose is destined to fade, but spring will come again as it does in many of the poems. In decline and death lie the vestiges of hope and renewal.
Thomas too, was a ghost-seer often in his work there are allusions to long disappeared people and places which, like revenants, linger still. Here memory and loss re-materialise as spectres. In ‘The Chalk Pit’ ‘emptiness and silence and stillness haunt me ... some ghost has left it now’ even though past activity has been lost the spiritual essence remains. It speaks too, of the impermanence of man against the continuity of immemorial nature.
Nowhere is the poignancy of memory and loss more evident than in his most famous poem ‘Adlestrop’, composed on 24th June 1914 as his train made an involuntary stop at Adlestrop station:
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The poem soon became a requiem for a world swept away by the First World War and is now tainted with the ironic reality that the railway station itself no longer exists, swept away by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s.
Frost’s great Poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ (1916) was seen by Thomas as criticism of his indecisive nature and perhaps instrumental in his choosing to join up and fight in France, rather than follow Frost on his return to America. Whatever the truth of it, the title had sad implications, because Thomas died on the Western Front in 1917 at the battle of Arras.
Thomas has now taken his rightful place in the pantheon of English poesy; his work appeared at a time when the modernist revolution in letters was taking hold, so in many ways it is seen as seminal. Despite this, Thomas still managed a nostalgia for the past and a deep understanding of the countryside which survived this cultural shift, without ever descending into sentimentality. His poetry manages to be accessible whilst simultaneously retaining that sense of mystery and wonder which all great observers of life possess. There are no epic poems, nor gratuitous classical references here but the use of everyday language in pursuit of the reminiscences that all of us carry. Little wonder that Ted Hughes described him as ‘the father of us all.’
This is a book for life.
First, an apologia pro me: I must be honest, Thomas’s poems are a re-read, having lived with them ever since I can remember. But as part of this reading challenge I decided to do something I have never done hitherto and read them as a body of work, not as individual pieces. The results were surprising and revealing. It opened my eyes to the thematic preoccupations which intrigued Thomas throughout his life.
Thomas’s poetry has received much attention in recent years with writers such as Robert Macfarlane bringing his work to wider attention. Thomas, like Macfarlane is today, was an inveterate walker and much of his output was born of his epic walks around England. The pulse of walking runs through his writing like a heartbeat; it is the life force of his art.
To understand Thomas’s poetry, we should first recognise that it represents only the last three years of what was a prolific, if short, life as a prose writer. By the time he came to write his first stanza he was already the author of several masterpieces, ‘In Search of Spring’, ‘The Icknield Way’ and ‘The South Country’, inter alia. Above all, these works established him as a writer of rural life, of its people and its places. It was Robert Frost who suggested that Thomas’s elegiac prose style would lend itself admirably to poetry, and so late in 1914 he published his first set of verses, initially under the name Edward Eastaway. He was perhaps both easily persuaded and daunted in equal measure, as he always considered poetry to be the highest form of literature. Thomas is, of course, revered as a war poet alongside Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Brooke and many others. But even in this grave subject it is his close connection with the countryside and his feeling for its past that make his poetry stand apart. Whereas Owen sighed that ‘all a poet can do today is warn’, Thomas both warns and crucially remembers the effect of war far from the battlefield itself.
Thus remembrance and loss; these words are the refrain that are absorbed into one’s psyche time and time again when reading Thomas. Writing prose about the countryside had taught him close observation and a sense of the subtle changes, both seasonal and evolutional, that all rural landscapes undergo. These changes inevitably give rise to the feelings of memory and the passing of all matter. Even in ‘In Memoriam’ (Easter, 1915) the loss of men in war is related to the memory of their presence in a rural idyll:
'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.'
And, away from conflict, the simple transience of life in nature, in ‘First Known when Lost’:
'I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone, - the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill
It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as bone,'
Throughout Thomas crystallizes his recollection with moments in the year’s seasonal cycle as in ‘The Word’, ‘I am content/With the wild rose scent that is like memory’ ... ‘The Path’, ‘The Combe’ and ‘The Manor Farm’ and many other poems shaped by the memory of what has been but will be again. So outwardly Thomas's concern with memory is a reading of the landscape gleaned not from stasis but a natural dynamic – birth, death and life. The wild rose is destined to fade, but spring will come again as it does in many of the poems. In decline and death lie the vestiges of hope and renewal.
Thomas too, was a ghost-seer often in his work there are allusions to long disappeared people and places which, like revenants, linger still. Here memory and loss re-materialise as spectres. In ‘The Chalk Pit’ ‘emptiness and silence and stillness haunt me ... some ghost has left it now’ even though past activity has been lost the spiritual essence remains. It speaks too, of the impermanence of man against the continuity of immemorial nature.
Nowhere is the poignancy of memory and loss more evident than in his most famous poem ‘Adlestrop’, composed on 24th June 1914 as his train made an involuntary stop at Adlestrop station:
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The poem soon became a requiem for a world swept away by the First World War and is now tainted with the ironic reality that the railway station itself no longer exists, swept away by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s.
Frost’s great Poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ (1916) was seen by Thomas as criticism of his indecisive nature and perhaps instrumental in his choosing to join up and fight in France, rather than follow Frost on his return to America. Whatever the truth of it, the title had sad implications, because Thomas died on the Western Front in 1917 at the battle of Arras.
Thomas has now taken his rightful place in the pantheon of English poesy; his work appeared at a time when the modernist revolution in letters was taking hold, so in many ways it is seen as seminal. Despite this, Thomas still managed a nostalgia for the past and a deep understanding of the countryside which survived this cultural shift, without ever descending into sentimentality. His poetry manages to be accessible whilst simultaneously retaining that sense of mystery and wonder which all great observers of life possess. There are no epic poems, nor gratuitous classical references here but the use of everyday language in pursuit of the reminiscences that all of us carry. Little wonder that Ted Hughes described him as ‘the father of us all.’
This is a book for life.
March 30, 2018
Contents:
Introduction by R. George Thomas, then (1983) Professor of English at University College, Cardiff
- very useful and interesting 12 pages.
Biographical Outline of Edward Thomas’ life.
Poems:
1914 – (15)
1915 – (78)
1916 – (50)
1917 – (1) Edward Thomas was killed on Easter Monday, 9th April 1917.
Notes on poems – 46 informative pages.
Appendix: Diary of Edward Thomas 1 January 1917 - 8 April 1917
Index of First Lines
My random thoughts, rather than a review..
Thomas would, I feel, appreciate the cover on my copy , a reproduction of ‘Sudden Storm’, a watercolour by a young Paul Nash, 1918, who E.T. knew. The book is a fine and worthy memorial to E.T., satisfying to read and to own. I’m very pleased to have read it after Matthew Hollis’s book about Thomas, “All Roads Lead to France”. I felt to relate much more sympathetically to Thomas after reading his diary which shows a practical more self assured individual than the neurotic self-doubting poet, author and critic we see in Hollis’ pages. He is a man at ease with himself and good at his new job, so very different from what he had done before. In its matter-of-factness I found the diary very moving.
For me, above all else, he was a man of nature in the same way as Thomas Bewick was 100+ years past. Bewick engraved, Thomas wrote. In his diary E.T. constantly refers to wildlife in and around the trenches and ruined French villages where he spent the last days of his life.
For me his poems are a mixed bag – some I loved, others much less so. Some I found to be annoyingly cryptic. Often there was a lack of directness, they didn’t hit me hard (compared say, with Owen. Few, if any, of Thomas’s poems are ‘War’ poems), they are often quiet and contemplative.
‘Adlestrop’ is perhaps his best known and loved and most frequently found in anthologies. Thomas’ life-long interest in folk songs shows through in some of his poems (he was a fine singer apparently). I suspect that his influence on other writers and poets is not always recognised. Did Thomas influence L. P. Hartley’s opening lines of his novel The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. Thomas’ opening line of his poem ‘Parting’ (1915) has “The past is a strange land, most strange”.
Thomas’ 1915 poem [‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’] goes some way to explaining his reasons for volunteering to fight, much to the surprise of many of his friends:
“This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers………………..
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God Save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe”.
Introduction by R. George Thomas, then (1983) Professor of English at University College, Cardiff
- very useful and interesting 12 pages.
Biographical Outline of Edward Thomas’ life.
Poems:
1914 – (15)
1915 – (78)
1916 – (50)
1917 – (1) Edward Thomas was killed on Easter Monday, 9th April 1917.
Notes on poems – 46 informative pages.
Appendix: Diary of Edward Thomas 1 January 1917 - 8 April 1917
Index of First Lines
My random thoughts, rather than a review..
Thomas would, I feel, appreciate the cover on my copy , a reproduction of ‘Sudden Storm’, a watercolour by a young Paul Nash, 1918, who E.T. knew. The book is a fine and worthy memorial to E.T., satisfying to read and to own. I’m very pleased to have read it after Matthew Hollis’s book about Thomas, “All Roads Lead to France”. I felt to relate much more sympathetically to Thomas after reading his diary which shows a practical more self assured individual than the neurotic self-doubting poet, author and critic we see in Hollis’ pages. He is a man at ease with himself and good at his new job, so very different from what he had done before. In its matter-of-factness I found the diary very moving.
For me, above all else, he was a man of nature in the same way as Thomas Bewick was 100+ years past. Bewick engraved, Thomas wrote. In his diary E.T. constantly refers to wildlife in and around the trenches and ruined French villages where he spent the last days of his life.
For me his poems are a mixed bag – some I loved, others much less so. Some I found to be annoyingly cryptic. Often there was a lack of directness, they didn’t hit me hard (compared say, with Owen. Few, if any, of Thomas’s poems are ‘War’ poems), they are often quiet and contemplative.
‘Adlestrop’ is perhaps his best known and loved and most frequently found in anthologies. Thomas’ life-long interest in folk songs shows through in some of his poems (he was a fine singer apparently). I suspect that his influence on other writers and poets is not always recognised. Did Thomas influence L. P. Hartley’s opening lines of his novel The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. Thomas’ opening line of his poem ‘Parting’ (1915) has “The past is a strange land, most strange”.
Thomas’ 1915 poem [‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’] goes some way to explaining his reasons for volunteering to fight, much to the surprise of many of his friends:
“This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers………………..
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God Save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe”.
August 29, 2022
Thomas is unjustly pegged as just another poet mooning around over the English countryside. In fact, he junks the trope of nature as all-purpose theme park. His favourite symbols are nettles and rain: unlovely yet revealing, closer to truth. Thomas’s forays into the countryside are quests for something wild, untamed, and just beyond man’s grasp.
Thomas searches for holes and hollows where birds, mice, and badgers (‘The most ancient Briton of English beasts’) alone have access. A recurring theme is birdsong: something almost explicable, mournful, and forever elusive. (In ‘The Owl’, the owl’s cry speaks ‘for all who lay under the stars /Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.’)
The same goes for the poems. ‘The Path’ is about a path made by children’s treading feet - ‘But the road is houseless and leads to no school.’ A sense of something just out of sight and earshot gives his poems - especially career highlight ‘Adlestrop’ - a distinctive, haunting feel.
I recommend the 2004 Faber edition, which also includes Thomas’s World War 1 diary.
Thomas searches for holes and hollows where birds, mice, and badgers (‘The most ancient Briton of English beasts’) alone have access. A recurring theme is birdsong: something almost explicable, mournful, and forever elusive. (In ‘The Owl’, the owl’s cry speaks ‘for all who lay under the stars /Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.’)
The same goes for the poems. ‘The Path’ is about a path made by children’s treading feet - ‘But the road is houseless and leads to no school.’ A sense of something just out of sight and earshot gives his poems - especially career highlight ‘Adlestrop’ - a distinctive, haunting feel.
I recommend the 2004 Faber edition, which also includes Thomas’s World War 1 diary.
November 24, 2014
One hundred years ago this month, during November 1914, at the age of 36, Edward Thomas wrote his first poem. He was killed at the battle of Arras in April 1917. Meaning he had to fit his entire life's work as a poet into a mere twenty-seven months. Fortunately, the poems came fast, sometimes at the rate of one a day. And even when he commenced upon his short life of soldiering, this pace barely decelerated until he was within months of that Easter Monday when a shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart, causing him to fall forever without a mark on his body. The body of work he left behind, despite the circumstances under which it was created, remains peerless. These are poems to read and reread and carry throughout life, and this beautiful edition from Faber is the perfect vessel in which to carry Thomas's words. Everything about this book deserves praise, from the hue of green chosen for the cover to the spacing between the lines. The book also includes the poet's War Diary of 1917, written in a small (3in. x 5in.) pocket-book, written in cramped handwriting with numerous abbreviations, not easy to read with the naked eye, and in places almost indecipherable thanks to thin ink and such heavy creasing that it seems likely that Thomas was carrying the diary the morning he died. Here we have it rescued from the morass of time and death, and regardless of brevity it is profoundly moving.
December 31, 2016
I went in search of Thomas after I read "Adlestrop" and was mesmerized by its numinous quality. I experienced these poems as a record of a beautiful consciousness that held the living world infinitely dear.
August 22, 2009
"This moment brief between two lives..."(from The Bridge) ever since I studied Edward Thomas at Oxford and memorized The Bridge on a train from Oxford to Bath Thomas has become a guide and mentor to my poetics and life in many ways. He is one of a few poets with whom I relate on so many levels and who made me see how beautiful poetry truly is and how it tells a story in a different way, his poems are a journal born of nature and walks in the rain, doubt and consideration blended in amazing structures. Another "great" poetic voice silenced by WWI & the trenches, but his poetry forever paints a journey to "the borders of sleep" and an England that exists still in the trees and the slow moving brook. He is worth reading & re-reading.
July 19, 2021
I enjoyed this collection of poetry but there is a lot more to this book, the research carried out by R George Thomas, no relation, is fascinating. The first part provides the various sources of the poetry, from Edward's private notebooks in the care of family members and libraries. Later on, we are presented with the various prose and letters written to friends, where the inspiration for the poems comes from, also included are rewrites of some of the poems so you can see the thought process. Relationships with his family and friends such as Robert Frost and Walter De La Mare can be seen through the letters.
On top of this, the three months of his war diary up to his death have been included.
The poetry is very much rooted in nature, especially that of the southern counties, with mentions of the chalk white horse, which is interesting as he served with the artist Paul Nash, who schooled Eric Ravilious, famous for his paintings of the Litlington chalk white horse on the South Downs.
So much more than just a collection of poetry.
On top of this, the three months of his war diary up to his death have been included.
The poetry is very much rooted in nature, especially that of the southern counties, with mentions of the chalk white horse, which is interesting as he served with the artist Paul Nash, who schooled Eric Ravilious, famous for his paintings of the Litlington chalk white horse on the South Downs.
So much more than just a collection of poetry.
August 2, 2021
I am biased regarding this one because for the past few months I have been living in the area that Thomas wrote about and where the writer spent most of his life. I walked the very walks that inspired these touching poems, and his writing helped me to notice details of the English countryside which I otherwise would have missed or not admired in the way his language guided me to. Edward Thomas wrote all of his poetry over a three year span, 1914–17 and most of it was about rural walks and local people in Southern England. He is considered a war poet because he joined the army and died in WWII and while that is reflected in his later works, most of his poems are pastoral and depict everyday reality.
The collected works I read contained his diary from the last days of his life when he was killed by mine while fighting on the front in France. It also contained his correspondence with his close friend and mentor Robert Frost.
The collected works I read contained his diary from the last days of his life when he was killed by mine while fighting on the front in France. It also contained his correspondence with his close friend and mentor Robert Frost.
December 30, 2018
I had not heard of Edward Thomas before reading "The Old Ways" by Robert MacFarlane several years ago. Macfarlane's recommendation was enough for me to buy this when I came across it in a used book store. Thomas was primarily a nature and travel writer, who later turned to poetry, and his love of nature shines out in almost every poem. He was a good poet, though not a great one, I think. I had trouble understanding what he was getting at in a few of them, and they all benefitted from more than one reading. But there were times when a phrase or an image was so beautiful, so spot on, so perfect, that all I could do was think "Yes!" What might he have written had he not been killed in World War I? I liked his poetry enough that I want to read his prose, and find out more about him.
October 19, 2022
Thomas' poetry must be read time and time again.
November 3, 2023
"How intense a happiness to him was the fruition of his lifelong hope and desire to prove himself a poet"
From the foreward:
"Late in his life, when he seemed to have given up hope of it, there came to him this sudden creative impulse, the incentive of a new form into which he could pour his thoughts, feelings and memories with ease and freedom and delight ... Yet in those last years, however desperate at times the distaste and disquiet, however sharp the sacrifice, he found an unusual serenity and satisfaction. His comradeship, his humour blossomed over. He plunged back from books into life, and wrote only for sheer joy in writing ."
In his poetry we find "the words of a heart and mind devoted throughout his life to all that can make the world a decent and natural home for the meek and the lovely, the true, the rare, the patient, the independent and the oppressed."
From 'Home'
The word “home” raised a smile in us all three,
And one repeated it, smiling just so
That all knew what he meant and none would say.
Between three counties far apart that lay
We were divided and looked strangely each
At the other, and we knew we were not friends
But fellows in a union that ends
With the necessity for it, as it ought.
Never a word was spoken, not a thought
Was thought, of what the look meant with the word
“Home” as we walked and watched the sunset blurred.
And then to me the word, only the word,
“Homesick,” as it were playfully occurred:
No more. If I should ever more admit
Than the mere word I could not endure it
For a day longer: this captivity
Must somehow come to an end, else I should be
Another man, as often now I seem,
Or this life be only an evil dream.
May 22, 2024
Beautifully presented edition of all of Edward Thomas' poetry written between early 1914 and his death at the beginning of the Battle of Ancre in April 1917, with comprehensive notes, a stimulating introduction, and his diary for the last four months of his life, recording in brief daily entries his experiences as a Second Lieutenant with an Artillery battery. This is a book to be treasured for reading again and again, and a worthy tribute to a fine British poet.
May 16, 2021
Walter de la Mare’s assessment of Thomas’ Collected Poems in the Foreword seems about right: “There is nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, obscure in his work. The feeling is never ‘fine,’ the thought never curious, or the word far-fetched. Loose-woven, monotonous, unrelieved, [is] the verse, as verse”—and often pedestrian the rhymes, I would add; even so, Thomas managed to capture the English imagination with his pastoral ruminations, archaic diction, and “the words of a heart and mind devoted throughout his life to all that can make the world a decent and natural home for the meek and the lovely, the true, the rare, the patient, the independent and the oppressed.”
Favorite poems:
“Lob”
“Words”
“February Afternoon”
“Over the Hills”
“Digging”
Favorite poems:
“Lob”
“Words”
“February Afternoon”
“Over the Hills”
“Digging”
July 22, 2022
Favourites: “Swedes” (goes well with Charles Kingsley’s “Poetry of a root crop”); “If I should ever by chance grow rich”; “Adlestrop”; “Words”; “Digging” (“Today I think only with scents”) and “Out in the Dark” which goes well with Peter Levi’s “In Midwinter a Wood Was”.
March 10, 2024
Nature and poetry meet. I read this because of Robert MacFarlane's Old Ways. I actually read all of his poetry in the Delphi Classics collection, but I wasn't interested in reading anything else in the collection.
January 1, 2025
Half of the time a Thomas poem can feel almost like a layperson's; half of the time it is a reminder of how excellent conventional verse could still be even amid the modernists. Poetry collections are hard to rate; I'd say there are a dozen really excellent poems here that one should read.
September 25, 2021
A favourite poet of mine, I’ve really enjoyed retreading his poems slowly, a few poems at a time, in the garden.
March 18, 2022
- Favourite poet
- Favourite poem: “The Cuckoo”
- Favourite poem: “The Cuckoo”
December 24, 2022
Beautiful poetry and poignant war diary capturing Thomas's love of nature and his family.
Read
December 27, 2023Sometimes he creates a wonderful image, and when he does it is magnificent. Even so, something about it all is unlikeable. Can't say what it is exactly but Walter de la Mare seems to get at what I find distasteful: “There is nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant [...] in his work. The feeling is never fine, the thought never curious, or the word farfetched. Loose-woven, monotonous, unrelieved [is] the verse, as verse”. When considering the structure of his poems, the rhyming can feel too stupid and excessive at times. Even the use of a metrical form feels unmusical. The use of repetitions to generate internal time-lags (“A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head”) and frame the threshold between world and mind is very beautiful.
June 21, 2009
Isn't it weird how you only read the three of four poems read out in the lecture, never the whole book when you're at college?
Outside of 'Adlestrop' and 'And You Helen', plus the odd stupid comments in the margins about lesbians by Mr RP Manwaring, Thomas was never more than an amusing running joke from the early 90s, but actually only now do I appreciate his work.
Not that discovering the sensitised beauties of 'Celandine' and 'The Private' would've made any difference to my awful degree of course, it just would've been nice not to have completely wasted three years sniggering at the idea of 'double-vision' and 'enjambment'.
Outside of 'Adlestrop' and 'And You Helen', plus the odd stupid comments in the margins about lesbians by Mr RP Manwaring, Thomas was never more than an amusing running joke from the early 90s, but actually only now do I appreciate his work.
Not that discovering the sensitised beauties of 'Celandine' and 'The Private' would've made any difference to my awful degree of course, it just would've been nice not to have completely wasted three years sniggering at the idea of 'double-vision' and 'enjambment'.
August 14, 2014
I have found reading Edward Thomas' poems particularly moving at this centenary of the outbreak of the First World War which killed him. His evocations of the English countryside are so timeless they could be descriptions of the natural world we see today. Yet his allusions to the ongoing war in France cast a tragic shadow over these beautiful and familiar rural scenes and make them of their time. The poems in this collection are of variable quality. I found many of the 'Late Poems" banal and uninspired. Yet there are sufficient gems to deepen my own love of the countryside and to make me want to return to Edward Thomas' poetry again and again.
May 25, 2013
I found this hard going to begin with - but I am glad I stuck with it. Some of the poems in the second half of the collection are exceptionally moving, and there is many a line that I am sure will stay with me.
May 7, 2023
Dreamy poet but average collection
3.5
Not my favourite collection but this is genius;
A light divided the swollen clouds
And lay most perfectly
Like a straight narrow footbridge bright
That crossed over the sea to me;
And no one else in the whole world
Saw that same sight.
3.5
Not my favourite collection but this is genius;
A light divided the swollen clouds
And lay most perfectly
Like a straight narrow footbridge bright
That crossed over the sea to me;
And no one else in the whole world
Saw that same sight.
January 30, 2011
Beautifully worked poems which capture the british countryside in stunning detail.
November 21, 2011
I liked these, despite his agnosticism. Pre WWI England described and felt.
September 4, 2012
One of the books that travel with me, for dipping into and connecting with.
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