A critic’s critic

Fifty years ago it was still reasonable to call Edward Thomas “a poet’s poet”: his general readership had remained small in the years after the publication of his two posthumous volumes, Poems (1917) and Last Poems (1918), even though W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney were all admirers. Nowadays it wouldn’t be surprising to hear him namechecked on The Archers. What happened to produce this dramatic change?

The answer has something to do with readers taking a while to tune in to his softly spoken voice (a similar thing happened to Elizabeth Bishop over a shorter time span); something to do with the way his work addresses environmental matters that are a priority today (the reputations of John Clare and Ivor Gurney rose during the same period for similar reasons, although in both cases the resolution of long-standing manuscript difficulties helped as well); something to do with the pathos of his story, which, as it became more widely known through biographies by Matthew Hollis (2011) and Jean Moorcroft Wilson (2015), increased the audience for his poems; something to do with the steadily growing popularity of his most-anthologized poem, “Adlestrop”; and something to do with the advocacy of his best critic and editor, Edna Longley. Longley, more effectively than any other of Thomas’s interpreters, has introduced him to a wider audience while setting a high scholarly standard in her edition of his poems (first published in 1973, revised and expanded in 2008), in her judicious selection from his many prose books, A Language Not to Be Betrayed (1981), and in her essay collection Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English lyric (2017). She is the ideal person to edit this recent substantial compendium of his writings on poetry, the fourth volume in OUP’s magnificent Selected Edition of his work.

Reading the result is like watching sunlight steal across a familiar landscape, confirming all sorts of features in Thomas’s mind that were previously known to exist while also revealing new aspects, unexpected contours and intriguing connections. As Longley makes her choice from the enormous number of poetry reviews that Thomas produced between 1900 and the months shortly before his death in 1917, she makes clear that in what Thomas routinely deprecated as “hack work” he in fact gave an immensely intelligent, fair-minded and wide-ranging account of British (and to a lesser extent American) poetry in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.

In particular, and especially fascinatingly, Thomas surveys the fading and/or reshaping of several great Victorian reputations (Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, William Morris), the emergence of a mixed bag of writers now usually referred to as Georgian (W. H. Davies and Walter de la Mare being the best of them) and the advance – still flickering at this stage – of those who would become known as modernists (he has shrewd things to say about the symbolists and Arthur Symons, warmly approving things to say about early poems and dramas by W. B. Yeats and interestingly contradictory things to say about Ezra Pound’s first two collections). Thomas emerges from Longley’s selection as a peerlessly clear-eyed and engaged witness to the origins of the literary period of which we are the direct inheritors; at the same time he gradually defined the aesthetic that shaped the poems he wrote in the last thirty-odd months of his life.

Who did Thomas think was the audience for these pieces? In the narrowest sense it was the readership of whatever papers and journals would hire him – most frequently the Daily Chronicle and the Morning Post: reviewing, between the time he left the University of Oxford in the summer of 1900 and enlisted in July 1915, was his main source of income, and in her introduction Longley has valuable things to say about the literary marketplace that both supported and exhausted him. In a wider sense, and at a time when the kind of literary criticism that we know today was still finding its feet, he was acting as a descendant of Matthew Arnold (with whom he has several significant disagreements) on behalf of the literary general reader. Thomas always writes with an appealing clarity, but also with an air of lightly worn expertise – of reading the present in the context of the past. And although almost the entire contents of this book were produced before he wrote any of his own poems, he always projects a remarkable sense of insider knowledge. A quality that he praises in Keats is abundantly true of himself: he moves as easily among the mighty dead as he does among the living.

That said, Thomas is preoccupied from first to last by the question of what the future holds for poetry. Or, to put it another way: he realizes from the start that he is writing at a cultural turning point and is always intent on encouraging poetry to manifest a distinctly contemporary sensibility and demonstrate what it means to be modern. Sometimes this emerges simply as an emphasis on the need to escape the excessive sweetness of late Victorians and decadent writers. Sometimes it has to do with finding poets who speak directly about the “strange disease of modern life” (the phrase is Arnold’s, of course, and is cited by Thomas; on other occasions he signals a similar preoccupation by borrowing from the title of a short story by Turgenev and referring to himself as “a superfluous man”). Most often, in ways that anticipate and parallel Pound, but without so much razzle-dazzle, he simply hunts down and praises poetry that feels “new”.

In the process Thomas is generally wary of speaking in abstractions or devising large theories about poetry – although he regularly repeats his preference for writing that approaches its ostensible subject from an oblique angle. As he says in his unfortunately titled Feminine Influence on the Poets (1910): “What [poets] say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent … Poetry is and must always be apparently revolutionary if active, anarchic if passive. It is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of ‘this world’ are parochial”. Given this emphasis it’s not surprising to find an equally frequent (Wordsworthian) emphasis on simplicity of diction, lack of formal ostentation and the advantages of conveying large ideas by concentrating on local and familiar things. It’s for these sorts of reason that he returns so often and so enthusiastically to the poems of Chaucer, the songs of Blake and (among his contemporaries) the poems of Davies and de la Mare. But his admiration for these and other like-minded writers depends on more than the clear force of their language; his sense of quality in general, and of modernity in particular, also relies on the way that sound and rhythm animate what they have to say.

Yeats is crucial to him in this respect. Even though (or because) Thomas is dealing with poems that are themselves trying to escape a world haunted by late-Romantic vagaries, he is quick to see that Yeats’s manipulations of Celtic folk traditions encourage him to devise a language that embodies “the movement of thought”. As he tracks this connection through successive new volumes of work by Yeats himself, then further refines his distrust of rhetoric in the full-length studies Maurice Maeterlinck (1911) and Walter Pater (1913), Thomas more and more deeply explores the idea that “the opposition between sound and ideas is false”. In so doing he created a definition of poetic merit that requires successful work to be at once energetic and modest, compelling and conversational, and he developed ideas about versifying that anticipate Robert Frost’s theory of “the sound of sense”.

That’s to say: when Thomas began his now-famous friendship with Frost in October 1913, he had already and quite independently formulated principles about the relationship between sound and meaning that Frost (initially at least) liked to claim as his own. And when he reviewed Frost’s second book, North of Boston, in three separate journals during the early summer of 1914, he did so in terms that are inevitably sharpened by Frost’s practice, but nevertheless draw on ideas that he had evolved in his own painstaking way through almost a decade and a half of hard writing. It’s no wonder that these reviews sound so excited: North of Boston, so far as Thomas was concerned, was the future that he’d been waiting to see (and hear) arrive. “This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive”, his first review began. (That “least aggressive” is perhaps a glance sideways at Pound and the Des Imagistes anthology, which he’d reviewed two months before first tackling North of Boston.) In the second review of Frost he says that “the sentences” of the book, “if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion”, and in the third he says that Frost “has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry again”. In all these judgements he confirmed his own first principles – knowing that they had now been brought to life in better poems than any he had previously seen written by his contemporaries.

There’s no doubt that Frost’s example and affection were vitally helpful in giving Thomas the self-confidence he needed to start writing poems himself. The outbreak of war was also decisive, not least because it made him think even more deeply about his feelings for England and “home”. (The word is as well used in his prose as it is in his poems.) Throughout his reviewing life he had pondered questions relating to writing and nationhood, commenting on it in poems by writers as diverse as Tennyson, Morris, Alfred Noyes, G. K. Chesterton – and Charles M. Doughty (who Thomas consistently overpraises: a rare misjudgement, but explicable in terms of subject). As the war approaches he becomes increasingly keen to condemn merely jingoistic writing (Ella Wheeler Wilcox) and to extol poetry that proceeds more quietly, without any obvious drumbeating. In an essay on “War Poetry”, published in December 1914, he reminds his readers: “I need hardly say that by becoming ripe for poetry the poet’s thoughts may recede far from their original resemblance to all the world’s and may seem to have little to do with daily events.”

This “recession” – not so much a retreat as a redistribution of subject via symbol and sympathetic observation – was a guiding principle in Thomas’s own poems, all of which were written after the outbreak of war, but only one in France, so soon after arriving was he killed. Long before they began to flowhe had evolved his own ways of making them “new”. His life as a poetry reviewer is the record of that evolution and a fascinating account of the false starts, half-steps, wrong turns and (in the case of Frost, especially) triumphant leaps forward that were taken by other writers of his generation. It means, as we read the closing pages of Edna Longley’s selection, that we have a clear sense of one era ending and the next beginning.

Inevitably, it also compounds our sense of sorrowful curiosity about things he did not live to write – not just write as poems, but in reviews. A few months after Edward Thomas was killed T. S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations. Despite the obvious difference between the forms of his own and Eliot’s poems (which he might have considered “aggressive”), it is hard not to believe that he would have felt his habit of hesitation was reflected back at him in Prufrock’s fretting about “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”, or seen that his demonstrations of the sound of sense were in step with Eliot’s ideas about the auditory imagination.

Andrew Motion’s most recent books are Sleeping on Islands: A life in poetry and New and Selected Poems 1977–2022, both published this year

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