Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917)

This piece is part of Overbooked, a series of reviews of overlooked books or authors, and Flak's attempt to redress the balance.

Today, perhaps more so than ever, the confessional lyric is the mode of choice: so natural a genre, indeed, that amateurs grope towards it instinctively. We see bearded poets crying their hearts out at open-mics; bespectacled ones, even, world-weary at seventeen, furiously pounding out songs about heartbreak on the computer. But here, at long last, is relief: Edward Thomas, a neglected master of the lyric. His poetry is, if you fancy yourself a writer, a sober reminder that good confessional poetry doesn’t just spring from wanting to sing the blues away; you need craft too.

The first part of the equation, unhappiness, Thomas knew well. Life before he found poetry was agony. A bitter childhood, true love at seventeen, second-class degree from Oxford, debt, debt — resolves to live by his pen — and further debt. Tries to wriggle out of poverty with hack-work: cue self-doubt and revulsion. (Thomas was, in his words, no fount of "easy nonsense"; churning out so much, so badly, for so little, depressed him. He wrote hundreds of pieces on his beloved countryside, as well as essays literary and biographical.) His children are born; he has to borrow to pay the nurse. More doubt. His wife remains earnestly faithful all the while. He hates himself.

This unhappiness finally let up when Thomas met the man who would encourage him to write poetry, Robert Frost, a year before the First World War broke out. The war brought a respite from writing for money; for once Thomas had time to write for himself. And write he did, dashing off all the 144 poems in the Collected Edward Thomas in just two years.

But enough of his life: on to his work. Let's start with the obvious, his powers of description. To him, a "clear eye" was bound up with spiritual vision and imagination. Thomas lets us see the old and familiar as beautiful and strange; a gift that any poet intending to chart, like him, the troubled waters of the heart should possess. Internal turmoil, quotidian and routine, if not tiresome to read about, is re-imagined and given life. He does this through the choice detail, employed only where apt: "elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass," "The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy." But this part is obvious: good lyrics should deal in the concrete, the startling, as a matter of course.

What distinguish Edward Thomas from lesser poets though are his special qualities, his maturity and honesty. Taking his eyes off the word count resulted in work — poems, this time — at once more crafted and personal. He eschewed the flamboyant; you won’t see any self-conscious posturing here. And unlike today’s emo-poets, his poems don’t overdo the sadness.

It’s remarkable too how consistent his style — adult subtlety — seems, or at least, how narrow in register his poems are. But as in Philip Larkin’s poetry this is an asset: the feelings are intense because they’re focused. What lingers in the mind after reading Thomas’ work is that intimate voice whispering of years lost, flaxen-haired, limber youth now grey and hobbling, the cherry trees shedding their leaves; and then the voice dying away, as if to join the things it spoke of in some far-off land.

To adapt a critic’s observation about Larkin (again! — would it be surprising if I said Larkin read Thomas?), metaphor to Thomas suggested "the comfort of disappearance, selflessness, away-ness." Except that for Thomas, escape was never that simple. The man was too concerned with staying true to himself to be glib about it. At times he longed for sheer oblivion:

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
In silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

But this isn't adolescent whingeing; it's far more restrained than that.

Elsewhere Thomas seems to vanish into nature. Metaphor then is a way to lose yourself in a one-ness with the surroundings, a means of seeing more clearly. Like Blake, Thomas insisted on the here and now: reality over abstraction. Consider one of his poems, Adlestrop. It describes a minute at a train station, during which the speaker enters into a kind of communion with the things around him.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

As the speaker notices more and more details — progressing naturally from the immediate "bare platform" and obvious "willows" to the minute, “grass," and finally that delightful expanded metaphor — he fades increasingly into the woodwork. By the second half of the poem all mention of the speaker ("I") has vanished. Instead, all we have left is his voice that, in the trailing off of the long syllables ("Farther and farther, all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire"), takes on the very dying fall of the birdsong he both sees and imagines.