Philip Edward Thomas was a British poet, essayist, and novelist. He is commonly
considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war
experiences, and his career in poetry only came after he had already been a
successful writer and literary critic. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army
to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of
Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
Life and career = Early life =
Thomas was born in Lambeth, London. He was educated at Battersea Grammar
School, St Paul's School in London and Lincoln College, Oxford. His family were
mostly Welsh. In June 1899 he married Helen Berenice Noble, in Fulham, 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. He was already a
seasoned writer by the outbreak of war, having published widely as a literary
critic and biographer as well writing on the countryside. He also wrote a novel,
The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, a "book of delightful disorder".
Thomas worked as literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London and became a
close friend of Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies, whose career he almost
single-handedly developed. From 1905, Thomas lived with his wife
Helen and their family at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks, Kent. He rented to
Davies a tiny cottage nearby, 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 poet himself at the end of 1914 when
living at Steep, East Hampshire, and initially published his poetry under the
name Edward Eastaway. 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.
Thomas immortalised the railway station at Adlestrop in a poem of that name
after his train made a stop at the Cotswolds station on 24 June 1914,
shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.
= War service = Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in
July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided
enlisting. He was unintentionally influenced in this decision by his
friend Frost, who had returned to the U.S. but sent Thomas an advance copy of
"The Road Not Taken". The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of
indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many
walks together; however, most audiences took the poem more seriously than Frost
intended, and Thomas similarly took it seriously and personally, and it
provided the last straw in Thomas' decision to enlist.
Thomas was promoted corporal, and in November 1916 was commissioned into the
Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. He was killed in action soon
after he arrived in France at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. To spare
the feelings of his widow Helen, she was told the fiction of a "bloodless death"
i.e. that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last
shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his
body. However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington
written in 1936 states that in reality the cause of Thomas' death was due to
being "shot clean through the chest". W. H. Davies was devastated by the death
and his commemorative poem "Killed In Action" was included in Davies's 1918
collection "Raptures". Thomas is buried in the Commonwealth War
Graves Cemetery at Agny in France. = Personal life =
Thomas was survived by his wife, Helen, their son Merfyn and their two daughters
Bronwen and Myfanwy. After the war, Thomas's widow, Helen, wrote about her
courtship and early married life with Edward in the autobiography As it Was;
later she added a second volume, World Without End. Myfanwy later said that the
books had been written by her mother as a form of therapy to help lift herself
from the deep depression into which she had fallen following Thomas's death.
Helen's short memoir My Memory of W. H. Davies was published in 1973, after her
own death. In 1988, Helen's writings were gathered into a book published
under the title Under Storm's Wing, which included As It Was and World
Without End as well as a selection of other short works by Helen and her
daughter Myfanwy and six letters sent by Robert Frost to her husband.
Commemorations Thomas is commemorated in Poets’ Corner,
Westminster Abbey, London, by memorial windows in the churches at Steep and at
Eastbury in Berkshire and with a blue plaque at 14 Lansdowne Gardens in
Stockwell, south London, where he was born.
There is also a plaque dedicated to him at 113 Cowley Road, Oxford, where he
lodged before entering Lincoln College. East Hampshire District Council have
created a "literary walk" at Shoulder of Mutton Hill in Steep dedicated to
Thomas, which includes a memorial stone erected in 1935. The inscription
includes the final line from one of his essays: "And I rose up and knew I was
tired and I continued my journey." As "Philip Edward Thomas poet-soldier"
he is commemorated, alongside "Reginald Townsend Thomas actor-soldier died
1918", who is buried at the spot, and other family members, at the North East
Surrey Cemetery. He is the subject of the biographical
play The Dark Earth and the Light Sky by Nick Dear, which premiered at the
Almeida Theatre, London in November 2012, with Pip Carter as Thomas and
Hattie Morahan as his wife Helen. Poetry
Thomas's poems are noted for their attention to the English countryside and
a certain colloquial style. The short poem In Memoriam exemplifies how his
poetry blends the themes of war and the countryside.
On 11 November 1985, Thomas was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate
stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription, written
by fellow poet Wilfred Owen, reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The
Poetry is in the pity." Thomas was described by British Poet
Laureate Ted Hughes as "the father of us all."
At least nineteen of his poems were set to music by the Gloucester composer Ivor
Gurney. Selected works
= Poetry collections = 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, ed. R. George Thomas, Oxford University Press,
1978. Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England, ed.
Elaine Wilson, Paul & Co., 1985. Edward Thomas: Selected Poems, ed. Ian
Hamilton, Bloomsbury, 1995. The Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. Peter
Sacks, Handsel Books, 2003. The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna
Longley, Bloodaxe Books, 2008. = Prose fiction =
The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, Duckworth, 1913. [2]
= Prose = In Pursuit of Spring Thomas Nelson and
Sons, April 1914 [3] = Essays and 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. Rest and Unrest, Dutton, 1910.
Light and Twilight, Duckworth, 1911. The Icknield Way, Constable, 1913.
The Last Sheaf, Jonathan Cape, 1928. References to Thomas by other writers
In 1918 W. H. Davies published his poem Killed In Action to mark the personal
loss of his close friend and mentor. Many poems about Thomas by other poets
can be found in the books Elected Friends: Poems For and About Edward
Thomas, edited by Anne Harvey, and Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and
Contemporary Poetry, edited by Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn.
Norman Douglas considered Thomas handicapped in life through lacking "a
little touch of bestiality, a little je-m'en-fous-t-ism. He was too
scrupulous". In his 1980 autobiography, Ways of
Escape, Graham Greene references Thomas's poem "The Other" in describing
his own experience of being bedeviled by an imposter.
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.
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?" 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".
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."
The children's author Linda Newbery has published a novel, "Lob" inspired by the
Edward Thomas' poem of the same name and containing oblique references to other
work by him. Woolly Wolstenholme, formerly of UK rock
band Barclay James Harvest, has used a humorous variation of Thomas' poem
Adlestrop on the first song of his 2004 live album, Fiddling Meanly, where he
imagines himself in a retirement home and remembers "the name" of the location
where the album was recorded. The poem was read at Wolstenholme's funeral on 19
January 2011. Stuart Maconie in his book Adventures On
The High Teas mentions Thomas and his poem "Adlestrop". Maconie visits the now
abandoned and overgrown station which was closed by Beeching in 1966.
Robert MacFarlane, in his 2012 book The Old Ways, critiques Thomas and his
poetry in the context of his own explorations of paths and walking as an
analogue of human consciousness. In his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth, Ian
McEwan has a character invoke Thomas's poem "Adlestrop," as a "sweet,
old-fashioned thing" and an example of "the sense of pure existence, of being
suspended in space and time, a time before a cataclysmic war."
The last years of Thomas's life are explored in A Conscious Englishman, a
2013 biographical novel by Margaret Keeping, published by StreetBooks.
References Additional sources
Hollis, M., 2011, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas,
Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24598-7 External links
Edward Thomas profile, Poets.org . Edward Thomas profile, Poetry Foundation
Works by Edward Thomas at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Edward Thomas at Internet Archive
Works by Edward Thomas at LibriVox Thomas, Edward, Works, Internet Archive
Edward Thomas Fellowship, UK: The Edward Thomas Fellowship .
"Dymock Poets Archive", Archives and Special Collections, UK: University of
Gloucestershire . Edward Thomas Archive at Cardiff
University "The Edward Thomas Collection", The
First World War Poetry Digital Archive, UK: Oxford University
Archival material relating to Edward Thomas listed at the UK National
Archives Portraits of Edward Thomas at the
National Portrait Gallery, London