Edward Thomas (poet)

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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 poem

Philip Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917) was an English poet and journalist. An accomplished writer, Thomas only turned to poetry in his later life after encouragement from the poet Robert Frost.

Following the outbreak of World War I Thomas enlisted in the army in 1915, and he is considered one of the war poets, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He was killed in action during the Battle of Arras (1917), soon after he arrived in France.

Contents 1 Early life 2 War service 3 Family life 4 Poetry 5 Literary output 5.1 Poems (selection) 5.2 Poetry 5.3 Essays 6 References in popular fiction 7 References 8 External links

[edit] 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 was of Welsh extraction. Unusually he married while still an undergraduate and determined to live his life by the pen. He was already a seasoned writer before the outbreak of war, and had worked as a journalist before becoming a poet, with the encouragement of his close friend Robert Frost. Living at Steep, in Hampshire, he initially published some poetry under the name Edward Eastaway. He also wrote a novel and some works of non-fiction.

[edit] War service

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.

Thomas is buried in Agny Military Cemetery, France (Row C, Grave 43).^[1] 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.

[edit] 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. 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.

[edit] Poetry

Thomas's poems are noted for their attention to the English countryside. 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.^[2]

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?"^[3] 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".^[4]

[edit] Literary output

[edit] Poems (selection)

• The Unknown Bird
• But These Things Also
• Tears
• The Lane
• And You, Helen
• 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

[edit] Poetry

• (Under pseudonym Edward Eastaway) Six Poems, 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, edited by R. George Thomas, Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England, edited by Elaine Wilson, Paul & Co., 1985.
• The Poems of Edward Thomas, edited by Peter Sacks, Handsel Books, 2003.

[edit] 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.

[edit] References in popular fiction

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.

Thomas's poem "Rain", written about his experience as a soldier in World War I, is referenced in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald during Gatsby's funeral in chapter nine. Thomas' line "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon" is reiterated nearly word for word as follows: "Dimly I heard someone murmur, 'Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,' and then the owl-eyed man said 'Amen to that,' in a brave voice."

Will Self's 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.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Text of Thomas' poems
• Works by Edward Thomas at Project Gutenberg
• The Woodland Life (1897), from 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.

Persondata
NAME	Thomas, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Thomas, Philip Edward; Eastaway, Edward
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Poet and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	March 3, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH	London Borough of Lambeth, London
DATE OF DEATH	April 9, 1917
PLACE OF DEATH	Pas-de-Calais, France