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“... often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from the shared world of trench-mud with astonishing freshness. And Gurney, at least, would have approved Taylor’s chosen prelude, a poem by that patron of all things common, Walt Whitman, whose work he appears to have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... banks which separate those two artificially divided streams, but he does so with remarkable force. Edward Thomas is a particularly strong influence, which is not surprising given that Thomas was a nature poet turned Tommy who therefore could serve as an imaginative proxy for Longley’s own soldier father. Another less ...”

“... For after all, the inspiring motive for two of the other finest combatant poets of the Great War, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, was patriotism. One could, if one wished, even make Edward Thomas out to be a jingoist, for did he not write: But with the best and meanest Englishmen I am one in crying, God save ...”

“... their people what the face of war was really like. Some, like Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden and Edward Thomas, quietly described their experiences without bitterness or emphasis, with much the same detachment and penetration with which they described the peaceful scenes that had first evoked their poetic gifts. Their verse is all the more compelling ...”

“... ease is worded by quotations from Dante Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Swift, Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas. But none of the quotations is evidence that their authors maintained a conviction in favour of oblivion; above it all, no such desire runs. The passages Ricks quotes are imaginings, voicings of a mood, not the last will and testament of any of ...”

“... days); he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly ...”

“... There is no inner tension, no feeling incommunicable in any other way, as there is in Eliot or Edward Thomas, or even in such an apparently frivolous squib as Betjeman’s ‘ Death in Leamington’. Housman was unexpectedly benevolent about Blunden’s poetry and helped to get him an award from the Royal Literary Fund: but he was a little dry about ...”

“... in various newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation ...”

“... it is appropriate, when not. The influences – Hopkins in ‘George Chapman – The Iliad’, Edward Thomas in ‘On Foscombe Hill’ and ‘Up There’ and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for certain, because so thoroughly ...”

“... by the million to disease. The disappearance of branch railway lines is also mourned, with Edward Thomas providing the requiem for the Adlestrops of the English ‘heartland’. Change and decay are not entirely matters of regret. The comfortable appearance of most present-day villages is a source of consolation. Richard Muir considers that the ...”

“... and 20th-century attempts to frame the landscape, in the manner of Fox Talbot, Pitt Rivers or Edward Thomas, are viewed with suspicion. Their pastoral fantasies – expressed in photography, archaeology or poetry – become a mark of distance and loss. In the closing pages, Thorpe plays a postmodern trick, suddenly introducing a character called Adam ...”

“... ambitious descriptions – those that bring her closest to, say, William Carlos Williams, or to Edward Thomas for that matter – remind us that we see only what we have learned to see, what our lives and our societies will let us see, that there is no unmediated nature: The cold rays of the bristle cone, she writes – she who admires ...”