by Edna Longley
This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry…These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets. The metre avoids not only the old-fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact, the medium is common speech and common decasyllables…Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion.14
A year later and now a poet himself, Thomas produced an impromptu joint manifesto as he set Bottomley straight about Frost’s theory:
I think… [Thomas Sturge Moore] had been misled into supposing that Frost wanted poetry to be colloquial. All he insists on is what he believes he finds in all poets – absolute fidelity to the postures which the voice assumes in the most expressive intimate speech. So long as these tones & postures are there he has not the least objection to any vocabulary whatever or any inversion or variation from the customary grammatical forms of talk. In fact I think he would agree that if these tones & postures survive in a complicated & learned or subtle vocabulary & structure the result is likely to be better than if they survive in the easiest form, that is in the very words & structures of common speech, though that is not easy or prose would be better than it is & survive more often.15
Robert Frost kick-started Thomas’s poetry. In his own words: ‘Edward Thomas had about lost patience with the minor poetry it was his business to review. He was suffering from a life of subordination to his inferiors. Right at that moment he was writing as good poetry as anybody alive, but in prose form where it did not declare itself and gain him recognition. I referred him to paragraphs in his book In Pursuit of Spring and told him to write it in verse form in exactly the same cadence.’ 16 Some critics play down Frost’s impact on Thomas. But it was not only his verse-theory or persistent cajoling that counted. More crucially, his practice showed the way. Thomas told Frost on 15 December 1914: ‘I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough.’ 17 He dedicated Poems to Frost. But he also called his poems ‘quintessences of the best parts of my prose books’, and declared aesthetic independence: ‘since the first take off they haven’t been Frosty very much or so I imagine and I have tried as often as possible to avoid the facilities offered by blank verse and I try not to be long – I even have an ambition to keep under 12 lines (but rarely succeed).’ 18 As Michael Hofmann says: ‘“Influence” seems…such a ridiculously, barbarously heavy notion here’.19 A kind of sibling differentiation led Thomas to eschew Frost’s narrative mode, to concentrate primarily on shorter poems. His forms, including his variations on the couplet or quatrain, are more diverse than Frost’s, and more specific to each occasion. Further, to apply favourite terms of Thomas’s, he found Frost’s poetry at once ‘familiar’ and ‘strange’: ‘It is curious to have such good natural English with just that shade of foreignness in the people and the poet himself.’ 20 Frost’s ‘foreignness’ helped to release his own distinctive poetic accent, along with the traditions behind it. All this went beyond personal rapport. England and America met on the ground of the English lyric.
In late 1913 too, after a bad period, Thomas began his memoir of childhood. The task improved both his mental state and creative morale: ‘The autobiography has begun by being the briefest quietest carefullest account of virtually everything I can remember up to the age of 8. I don’t trust myself to build up the self of which these things were true. I scarcely allow myself any reflection or explanation’; ‘My object at present is daily to focus on some period & get in all that relates to it, allowing one thing to follow the other that suggested it. It’s very lean but I feel the shape of the sentences & alter continually with some unseen end in view.’ 21 Here Thomas identifies therapeutic recall with stylistic breakthrough. And he describes a prose that anticipates his poetic strategies: close focus, little comment, no unitary ‘self’, sound and image taking the lead. When he lacerates his earlier prose it is for afflatus that imposes on language, for a solipsistic or derivative vision that imposes on life.
Thomas’s self-criticism, like his criticism, was always ahead of his literary practice. For instance, he called The Heart of England (1906) ‘Borrow & Jefferies sans testicles & guts’.22 But practice and theory fused at this proto-poetic moment. In rebuking Walter Pater (whom he had once imitated) for turning language into static display, for ‘using words as bricks’, he was again exorcising his own mannerisms. Pater’s lifeless style helped him to understand the primacy of rhythm, its physiological and psychological origins: ‘Literature … has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become.’ For Thomas, the ‘music of words’ also carries ‘an enduring echo of we know not what in the past and in the abyss’.23 Poetic rhythm, thus understood, is latent in prose sketches from which his early poems, ‘Up in the Wind’ and ‘Old Man’, emerged.
Believing that salvation must come from outside himself, Thomas sometimes wished for ‘a revolution or a catastrophe’.24 The Great War duly obliged. It changed his daily life, since reviewing and book commisssions dried up. He had time to think, and thinking changed other things. The date of his first poem, 3 December 1914, is to the point. In Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography (1970) William Cooke argues that the war was the main ‘begetter’ of Thomas’s poetry. Perhaps, however, ‘The sun used to shine’, a poem that brings together the war, Frost and English landscape, symbolises his poetic matrix – and the impossibility of separating its various elements. In this edition, the Notes try to track the war’s shifting presence as Muse, context, horizon, and shaping force. One starting point might be a letter from Thomas to Walter de la Mare, written during the August 1914 holiday that ‘The sun used to shine’ commemorates: ‘Rupert Brooke I hear has joined the army. The Blast poets I hear have not. If the war goes on I believe I shall find myself a sort of Englishman, though neither poet nor soldier.’ 25 A year later, Thomas was all three.
Rivalry with Brooke – as regards Englishness, soldiering, and poetry – may have spurred him on. Thomas explained to Edward Garnett that Poems would appear under his pseudonym, ‘Edward Eastaway’, ‘because I should hate the stupid advertisement some papers might give it, though going to France two years late is nothing to advertise a book of verse’.26 Frost attributes Thomas’s enlistment to fear that he had been cowardly when threatened by a belligerent gamekeeper: an event to which Thomas’s poem ‘An Old Song I’ alludes.27 In June 1915 Thomas saw his immediate future as a choice between enlisting and joining Frost in America, where, with Frost’s help, he hoped to find literary work. At that time he wrote to Frost, linking the gamekeeper incident with Brooke’s death and his own right to criticise Brooke’s poetry: ‘I had to spoil the effect of your letter by writing 1000 words about Rupert Brooke’s posthumous book – not daring to say that those sonnets about him enlisting are probably not very personal but a nervous attempt to connect with himself the very widespread idea that self sacrifice is the highest self indulgence… I daren’t say so, not having enlisted or fought the keeper’.28 Being overage, Thomas did not need to enlist. His motives for doing so were mixed and complex. Interpretations that either stress patriotism by itself, or see his enlistment as a version of his death wish, seem too simple. But certainly, he was setting himself a test: a test that fused war and poetry. Thomas later tested himself to the uttermost by joining the Royal Artillery, volunteering for service overseas, and, once in France, seeking front-line action. For a family man, even though some financial help was secured,29 all this might seem highly i
rresponsible. Or we might reflect on Frost’s epitaph: ‘I have heard Edward doubt if he was as brave as the bravest. But who was ever so completely himself right up to the verge of destruction, so sure of his thought, so sure of his word?’ 30
Thomas’s poetry can be read as the metaphysical counterpart of his enlistment. If at one level it is psychodrama, at another it is cultural defence; while being at odds with the self-sacrificial Brooke-cult, with propagandist verse, and with the co-option of poetry for bombast about “heritage”. The war mobilised his historical as well as contemporary sense of English poetry. The literariness that had blighted his prose suddenly became a creative asset: an intertextual stimulus that works on many levels. In terms of form alone, Thomas runs through the lyric gamut. There are parallels with Wilfred Owen saying: ‘what would hold me together on a battlefield [is the] sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote’.31Thomas’s deep allusiveness tests the best-read reader (he and Frost were sardonic about Pound wearing his erudition on his poetic sleeve). Yet he did not take continuity for granted. He realised that English poetic “tradition”, its language, forms, structures and genres, had been pitched into the war’s vortex. This is partly what Frost means when he says that Thomas’s poetry ‘ought to be called Roads to France’.32 Similarly, France haunts the poetic landscapes that distil Thomas’s experience of the English and Welsh countryside, including its literary incarnations and his own past writings. If his poetry can be called “Home Front” poetry, it exposes the contradiction in those terms.
The founding narratives of “modern poetry” marginalise Edward Thomas. This is odd, given his transatlantic alliance with Frost and call-up of English poetry – obsession with tradition being a mark of the modern movement. Again, the fact that he never met Owen does not mean that they belong to different poetic universes. But American appropriation of the “modern”, licensed by English cultural cringe, demotes “Nature poetry”. Neither Thomas nor Frost got into Michael Roberts’s epoch-defining Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936). To treat Thomas as an isolated figure is also to ignore his criticism, his transition from art for art’s sake to speech rhythms, and his argument with Ezra Pound (see below). His aesthetic, which retains a fin-de-siècle interest in ‘beauty’, is closely meshed with developments since the 1890s. That includes his relation to so-called “Georgian” poetry. Thomas knew, and had often reviewed, most of the poets chosen by Edward Marsh for his five Georgian anthologies (1912-1922). In Edward Thomas’s Poets (2007) Judy Kendall sets poems and letters by Thomas alongside texts by English poet-friends as well as by Frost. The arrangement shows how Thomas’s ‘struggles and experiments in composition’ intersect with his critical response to contemporaries like Bottomley, de la Mare and W.H. Davies.33 But, apart from de la Mare (his most significant poet-friend before Frost), who influenced his handling of childhood, folk sources, and ‘strangeness’, this group is more or less covered by Frost’s remark about Thomas ‘losing patience’ with minor poets. Thomas assimilated French Symbolism, English aestheticism and the Irish Revival, and he reviewed Hardy, Yeats, Pound and Lawrence with remarkable insight. His poetry criticism stresses the ear, as if – long before Frost turned up – he were listening for the sounds of the new century. Thus in 1904 he praised the ‘infinitely varied measure’ of Yeats’s blank verse.34 Conversely, he could be merciless to the old century, as when dismissing Swinburne’s ‘musical jargon that includes human snatches, but is not and never could be speech’.35
Thomas’s mature criticism desires poetry to balance speech and music so that words ‘support one another’, and each word ‘lives its intensest life’. He invokes this ideal to question the esoteric tendencies of French Symbolism, as when a poem by Maeterlinck is ‘hardly more than a catalogue of symbols that have no more literary value than words in a dictionary’.36 He praises Yeats’s more holistic symbols for being ‘natural, ancient, instinctive, not invented’.37 Thomas and Yeats conceive symbolism as appealing to widely intelligible archetypes, and as applying to every aspect of a poem’s structure. This, like other parallels between the poets, marks their common origins in Romanticism. Both poets dramatise the self by manipulating ‘tone and pitch of voice’. Both associate poetic rhythm with the body. Both invest in the mystique of nomadic ‘life that loves the wild’ (‘Up in the Wind’). Both activate the folk ghost by drawing on country speech and traditional songs. Attracted to the Irish Revival’s local, national and mythic frameworks, Thomas said that Yeats was ‘to be envied, like a man with a fine house’.38 Yeats’s “Ireland” influenced Thomas’s “England”. And, while never seeking a surrogate religion, Thomas shared Yeats’s objections to the triumph of scientific modernity: ‘Myths have been destroyed which helped to maintain a true and vivid acknowledgment of the mystery of the past.’ 39
Thomas’s doubts about Pound and Imagism are continuous with his attitudes to Pater and to shallow symbolism. This quarrel still affects how we think about poetry today. Thomas was initially stirred by Pound’s ‘revolt against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry’, which may have remained a provocative stimulus. But he condemned Pound’s Exultations (1909) for being ‘dappled with French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and old English, with proper names that we shirk pronouncing, with crudity, violence and obscurity, with stiff rhythms and no rhythms at all’, and shrewdly warned: ‘If he is not careful he will take to meaning what he says instead of saying what he means.’40 Reviewing the anthology Des Imagistes (1914), Thomas finds that Pound ‘has seldom done better than…under the restraint imposed by Chinese originals or models’. But he calls the anthology itself ‘a tall marble monument’, and compares its prevailing style to ‘the ordinary prose translation of the classics – in short, the crib’.41 For Frost and Thomas, Imagist mimicry of the visual arts fails to understand that the ear, not the eye, is primary in poetry: ‘The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader’.42 Thus they turn Imagism’s painterly and sculptural self-image against it: Frost attacks ‘kiln-dried tabule poetry’.43 Their resistance to Imagism also covers the spatial effects introduced by free verse layout.
Today it is clear that varieties of free verse have not taken over English-language poetry, which moves between poles of “freedom” and “traditional form”. Not that traditional form has stood still (if it ever did). A century ago, Yeats, Frost and Thomas found new ways to exploit the counterpoint between syntax and line or stanza. It is also now clear that disjunctive poetry has no monopoly on modernity. Like Yeats and Frost, Thomas adapts lyrical syntax to relativistic metaphysics. His poems destabilise perception, split or decentre the lyric “I”, ponder slippages between ‘word’ and ‘thing’. But Thomas’s dark forests and nihilistic prospects are in dialogue with other symbols and perspectives, and his questing imagination never rests on any pole. His poetry is radically dialectical.
Since first editing Thomas’s poetry thirty-five years ago,44 I have come to realise how fully he worked out his ars poetica, and how often the poems themselves “reflexively” encode aesthetic principles. Meanwhile, critics such as Andrew Motion, Stan Smith and Michael Kirkham have illuminated the poetry, partly by expanding our sense of its literary and historical contexts. Smith, for instance, reads it in close relation to the socio-political tensions of Edwardian England. These and other critics are quoted in the Notes. On the textual and biographical front, the invaluable scholarship of R. George Thomas climaxed in his edition of the Collected Poems (1978), Edward Thomas: A Portrait (1985), and Edward Thomas: Selected Letters (1995). Yet many other letters remain unpublished; the mass of archival documents warrants another biography; and an edition of Thomas’s ‘Essential Prose’ (Oxford University Press) has only now been mooted. Small presses, such as the Cyder Press, have valiantly kept the prose in print. It seems that we are still catching up with Edward Thomas: perhaps because his poetry is so far ahead. I had to write a wholly different commentary this time round, and it too will date in due cours
e. And if Thomas’s poetry still escapes the “modernist” narrative predicated on Eliot and Pound (rather than on Yeats), that narrative is showing its own age. Yet newer critical vocabularies – I will mention three – may not so much open up his poems as vice versa, since the poems got there first.
As already noted, Thomas’s poetry was psychoanalytical before psychoanalytical criticism. Second, on a more public front, it both explores and complicates “identity politics”. Thomas thought that imperialism had hollowed out England’s inner life: a highly topical theme today. Thus he praises Irish poets for ‘singing of Ireland … with an intimate reality often missing from English patriotic poetry, where Britannia is a frigid personification’.45 Hence his creation of ‘Lob’ and refusal to aim his wartime anthology This England at ‘what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete’. But in representing “England” with an inwardness partly learned from Irish, Welsh and American sources, in devolving it to Hampshire or Wiltshire, in breaking up “Britain”, Thomas does not fix new boundaries, just as he does not ring-fence a national canon. His Welsh horizons, which make “home” itself ever unstable, prompt many kinds of poetic border-crossing. He calls himself both ‘mainly Welsh’ and one of ‘those modern people who belong nowhere’.46 Thomas allows a poem’s structures to define its affiliations. He unpredictably shrinks or enlarges a mental landscape or knowable community. This explains why his own ‘intimate realities’ have fed back into poetry from the rest of these islands, as has his historical sense of place and landscape.
