Loose Woven

Peter Howarth

• Collected Poems by Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas
  Faber, 264 pp, £12.99, October 2004, ISBN 0 571 22260 9

The blurb on this excellent new and expanded edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems tells you that Thomas was ‘one of the great English poets of the 20th century’, which is true, and that he was not really a ‘war poet’ but a lonely nature poet, which is slightly less true. The First World War is tacitly present in all the poems here, not only colouring their characteristic attitude towards nature and solitude, but as the condition for their being written at all. Thomas, who was killed at Arras in 1917, didn’t write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could write poetry, the more he would lose interest in his literary journalism, the less he would earn from it, and the more inevitable it would be that he would have to enlist in order to support his family. But as the person whose chivvying, confidence and encouragement had done most to help Thomas make that decision ‘in form’, Frost also knew he had been part of the complex and tangled relation of circumstances which had put Thomas on the road to France as well as to poetry, and this knowledge tinges the poem he sent to Thomas about a month before the latter enlisted in July 1915: