Thomas and the Literary Background

Abstract

The writer to whom Thomas owed most in spirit was Richard Jefferies (1848–1887), journalist and country-writer, pagan and mystic. Thomas had known his work from his boyhood when he had taken as his motto the concluding words of one of Jefferies’s most famous books, The Amateur Poacher: ‘Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients called divine can be found and felt there still’. In a series of nature books that culminated spiritually in The Story of My Heart (1883), Jefferies revealed a deep knowledge of country life and a mystic, semi-religious sense of Nature, which only a tragically early death, like Thomas’s, prevented from achieving final, mature expression.