Edward Thomas

Abstract

Born of predominantly Welsh parentage in 1878, Edward Thomas read history at Oxford and married while still an undergraduate. There were three children, and a constant shortage of money, largely the result of his decision to live by his writing. He produced thirty books of prose between 1897 and 1915, quite apart from his poems, innumerable book reviews, and various editions and anthologies. William Cooke gives a painful account of Thomas’s drab, unremitting labour in Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography (1970). There is a good examination of the prose in this book, and in H. H. Coombes’s Edward Thomas (1956). Comparisons are invidious, but Cooke’s work especially shows the relationship, in all its inequality, between the prose and the poetry, and the growth of the one from the other. For Thomas, the prose was a testing ground and a filter through which the poems came. While, on the one hand, it is surprising that he survived the labour of his prose to write his poetry, on the other, he was in a sense preparing himself for his poetry.