From Adlestrop to Arras - a poet's life

An annotated edition of Edward Thomas's glorious verse sheds new light on an incisive poet of subtlety and cunning
Annotated Collected Poems by Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems
Edited by Edna Longley
Bloodaxe £12, pp332

'For the last hundred years,' Edward Thomas wrote in 1913, 'ideas and the material of ideas have come to the reading classes mainly through books and bookish conversation. Their ideas are in advance of their experience, their vocabulary in advance of their ideas.' For Thomas, a travel writer and hack literary journalist until he became a poet in the last two years of his life, there was something debilitating about the virtual reality of books. The reading classes, it had been hoped, would bring the other classes closer together, but this hope was smashed for Thomas's generation by the First World War in which he died in 1917, killed by a shell in the Arras offensive.

Thomas has always been a powerful and poignant figure, partly because he represents an alternative, more 'accessible' tradition of English poetry to the more 'difficult' cosmopolitan Modernist poets and partly because he became a poet so briefly (under the tutelage of his American friend Robert Frost), and then died at 39, having written some of the most remarkable poems in the language. Edna Longley's revised new edition of his poems, with its nearly 200 pages of notes to just over 100 pages of poetry, shows just how original, how unplaceable Thomas's sensibility was as he came into his own as a poet.

Using wonderful quotations from Thomas's voluminous prose works and from his letters, Longley's edition does something that biography, even at its best, can never quite do: it allows the reader to drop the idea that in a writer's life, one thing causes another. Longley's notes, full as they are of geographical locations and links with Thomas's autobiographical writings, never suggest that because Thomas went there, or met that person, he therefore wrote that poem. There are no implied inevitabilities.

So, for Thomas's most famous, uncannily simple poem 'Adlestrop', nominally about the poet's experience of stopping on a journey at a small country station, Longley gives us fairly exact instructions of where Adlestrop is, but then quotes from Thomas's notebook an apparently offhand remark: 'Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between two periods of travel.' Just what an extraordinary silence might be - or what stops a silence being ordinary - is something the poem seems to explore. Longley gives us a sense of a groundswell of preoccupations that become the poem. But for Thomas, turning his prose into poetry, as Robert Frost suggested he should, did the trick. The notes in this book give us the prose, often itself wonderful to read, that the poetry transformed and, by doing so, show us just what poetry can add.

It wouldn't occur to many people who love or like Thomas's poetry that they would need an annotated collected poems, any more than they would want an annotated Hardy, Betjeman or Larkin. What makes Thomas's poetry more congenial than the poetry of his near contemporaries Yeats, Pound and Eliot is that it can be read by those who know little or nothing of what was once called European literature (Longley quotes Thomas writing of the 'sad people' who write poetry to 'get rid of their dreams, their debts and the effect of reading other men's verse'). There are no references in Thomas's poetry to esoteric religious texts or to what Kingsley Amis once referred to as the 'myth-kitty'. So any editor of Thomas's poetry has the task of working out what, if anything, might make the poems more rather than less interesting as made objects.

Thomas's is a poetry of elusive experiences, of moods and thoughts and feelings that are so difficult to clarify they require the simplest of words: 'Not the end: but there's nothing more,' begins his well-known poem 'Home', which points to the strange beginning that leaving home always is. Longley glosses this with a quote from Thomas's prose piece Aurelius, the Superfluous Man: 'The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn around all of us at birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling multitudes.' The prose makes us all, to some extent, superfluous people and the irony doesn't escape Thomas; the poem that is at once more simply written and more incisive makes us feel more lost and more confounded by the loss.

'That land/ My home, I have never seen,' the poem continues. 'No traveller tells of it,/ However far he has been.' The poetry makes the preoccupations of the prose more lucid by showing just how enigmatic they really are. After reading Thomas again in Longley's always informative and often intriguing edition, he seems subtler and more cunning as a poet and his often evocative, descriptive prose seems full of potential, poetry waiting to happen. In his poetry, Thomas finally realised what he could do.

July by Edward Thomas (c1905)

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake

Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.

The boat itself stirs only when I break

This drowse of heat and solitude afloat

To prove if what I see be bird or mote,

Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.

Long hours since dawn grew, - spread, - and passed on high

And deep below, - I have watched the cool reeds hung

Over images more cool in imaged sky:

Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;

All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,

Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.

· To order The Annotated Collected Poems for £11 with free UK p&p, go to or call 0870 836 0885

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