Search results for ""author edward thomas""

Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of "Edward Thomas' Poets": Judy Kendall's gathering of poems and letters embeds that brief period of intense poetic creativity within the wider narrative of Thomas' life. For the first time, letters by Thomas about writing and publishing are set alongside his poems, revealing the occasions of their composition, illuminating the processes of recollection, revision and development that transformed him into a poet. Interleaved with Thomas' own poems and letters are works by the literary friends whom he criticised and admired, and whose influence he absorbed: Walter de la Mare, W.H. Hudson, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others. Many of the letters included here have not been collected before or are out of print.Enhanced by Judy Kendall's detailed notes and bibliographies, "Edward Thomas' Poets" provides a new perspective on Thomas' reading and writing of poetry, illuminating specific poems and revealing the complex sources of his mature verse.

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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.

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Edward Thomas' stories formed an important stage in his imaginative development, and constitute a significant achievement. His fiction includes stories reflecting his personal quest for spiritual and social values, which have considerable psychological interest; and versions of traditional Celtic and Norse tales and English proverbs. In both original and traditional tales Thomas explores the relation between the human world and the realm of nature. His stories were, as he said, written under a 'real impulse', and they represent his whole effort to shape imaginative responses to fundamental questions of life and death, the self, and reality. "The Ship of Swallows" is the first selection to have been made exclusively from Edward Thomas' fiction, which it represents at its best.

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When Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 his poems were largely unpublished. But in the years since his death, his work has come to be cherished for its rare, sustained vision of the natural world and as 'a mirror of England' (Walter de la Mare). This edition, drawn from Thomas's manuscripts and typescripts as well as from his published works, offers an accessible introduction to this most resonant - and relevant - of poets.'In his lifetime, he was known and loved by a very, loving few. Now, since his death, he is known and loved by very many, and yearly this is more so. There is in his poems an unassumingly profound sense of permanence. A war came and ditched him, but his poems stay with no other wounds than those which caused them.' Dylan Thomas 'A very fine poet. And a poet all in his own right. The accent is absolutely his own.' Robert Frost'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' Michael Longley

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In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

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Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work.

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Edward Thomas wrote most of his poems during active service in World War I - poems which search for the true self, and affirm the oneness of all experience.

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"No city preserves the memory and signature of so many men. The past and the dead have here as it were, a corporate life..." Edward Thomas is now best known for the poetry he wrote between 1914 and his untimely death at Arras in 1917. But during his lifetime his reputation was based on the extraordinary body of travel writing, reviews, and critical books he produced against intense deadline pressures in order to feed his growing family. His travel books, most notably Oxford and The South Country have had an enduring appeal for all lovers the English countryside. Through these and his later poems, Thomas has come to be regarded as the quintessential English writer. And yet he was Welsh, observing and loving England as a semi-outsider. Oxford, published three years after he completed his degree, was Thomas's first major commission. In it, he gives an evocative account of Oxford's architecture, history, and customs, drawing on personal memories of undergraduate life at Lincoln College. His prose was written to accompany the paintings of Fulleylove, who shared his interest in juxtaposing Oxford's grandeur with the ordinary details of domestic life. Between them, the artist and the writer catch the beauty of this "city within the heart" at a pivotal moment in pre-war history, and give it to us as though it could last forever in that form. In a Critical Introduction, Lucy Newlyn examines the importance of Oxford as a historical record. But she also argues that it is a piece of vivid experimental prose, in which much of Thomas's later greatness is anticipated. Her analysis of his prose style shows how Thomas tries out the voices of the past, defining his own particular brand of Modernism by creating a kind of "bricolage" through allusion and imitation. Running steadily beneath the text's elaborate ventriloquism is the quiet ruminative voice of the authentic Thomas, edging ever closer to the simple speech rhythms of his lyric poems. This is the first critical edition of Oxford, giving long overdue credit to the book as an early masterpiece in the Thomas oeuvre.

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Edward Thomas's death in the Second World War robbed the world of a great poet, a fine writer, and a pioneering environmentalist. Published in 1909, The South Country is the happiest of all his books. Lyrical, passionate, acutely sensitive to life in the countryside and the rhythms of the seasons, it brilliantly merges landscape, folk culture and natural history into a record of what Edward Thomas saw and felt as he wandered the old ways of southern England.

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