The Annotated Collected Poems
EDWARD THOMAS
THE ANNOTATED COLLECTED POEMS
Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime’s poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a “war poet”, he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a “nature poet”, his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century.
Edna Longley published an earlier edition of Thomas’s poetry in 1973. Her work advanced his reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version with a new, definitive text of all of his poems which draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive Notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas’s prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems.
The prose hinterland behind Thomas’s poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas’s criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as “ecocriticism”, that are now applied to his poems.
‘Edna Longley’s definitive new edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems makes a case for the enduring, essential relevance to the 21st century of this English poet who died in World War I. The book is a crowning achievement by Thomas’s best advocate, approachable by the beginner and invaluable to the specialist, with a critical apparatus which is at once a biography tracing the growth of the poet’s mind and an engrossing anthology of his vivid, melancholy prose’ – SEAMUS HEANEY
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas’s prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988) from Faber, and Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000) from Bloodaxe. She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000).
COVER PAINTING
Paul Nash (1889-1946): Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 (1918) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM, LONDON
EDWARD THOMAS
THE ANNOTATED
Collected Poems
edited by
EDNA LONGLEY
The editor and Bloodaxe Books are extremely grateful to the Executors of the Estate of Myfanwy Thomas for permission to quote from manuscripts and typescripts of Edward Thomas’s poems; from his letters, diaries and notebooks; and from The Childhood of Edward Thomas. They are also indebted to Henry Holt & Co. for permission to quote from Complete Poems of Robert Frost (1949) and from (ed.) Lawrance Thompson, Selected Letters of Robert Frost (1964); and to Handsel Books, publishers of (ed.) Matthew Spencer, Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to one another (2003).
Further thanks are owed to the following libraries: the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Cardiff University Library; Dartmouth College Library; the Lockwood Memorial Library; and the National Library of Wales. The editor’s personal thanks go to Richard Emeny and the Edward Thomas Fellowship; to Peter Keelan, Head of Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University Library; to Guy Cuthbertson, Anne Margaret Daniel, Declan Kiely, Andrew Motion, Lucy Newlyn and John Pikoulis; and, above all, to Myfanwy Thomas, to whose memory this edition is dedicated.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on Text of this Edition
Up in the Wind
November
March
Old Man
The Signpost
After Rain
Interval
The Other
Birds’ Nests
The Mountain Chapel
The Manor Farm
An Old Song I
An Old Song II
The Combe
The Hollow Wood
The New Year
The Source
The Penny Whistle
A Private
Snow
Adlestrop
Tears
Over the Hills
The Lofty Sky
The Cuckoo
Swedes
The Unknown Bird
The Mill-Pond
Man and Dog
Beauty
The Gypsy
Ambition
House and Man
Parting
First known when lost
May 23
The Barn
Home (‘Not the end’)
The Owl
The Child on the Cliffs
The Bridge
Good-night
But these things also
The New House
The Barn and the Down
Sowing
March the Third
Two Pewits
Will you come?
The Path
The Wasp Trap
A Tale
Wind and Mist
A Gentleman
Lob
Digging (‘Today I think’)
Lovers
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
Head and Bottle
Home (‘Often I had gone’)
Health
The Huxter
She dotes
Song
A Cat
Melancholy
Tonight
April
The Glory
July
The Chalk-Pit
Fifty Faggots
Sedge-Warblers
I built myself a house of glass
Words
The Word
Under the Woods
Haymaking
A Dream
The Brook
Aspens
The Mill-Water
For These
Digging (‘What matter makes my spade’)
Two Houses
Cock-Crow
October
There’s nothing like the sun
The Thrush
Liberty
This is no case of petty right or wrong
Rain
The clouds that are so light
Roads
The Ash Grove
February Afternoon
I may come near loving you
Those things that poets said
No one so much as you
The Unknown
Celandine
‘Home’ (‘Fair was the morning’)
Thaw
If I should ever by chance
If I were to own
What shall I give?
And you, Helen
The Wind’s Song
Like the touch of rain
When we two walked
Tall Nettles
The Watchers
I never saw that land before
The Cherry Trees
It rains
Some eyes condemn
The sun used to shine
No one cares less than I
As the team’s head-brass
After you speak
Bright Clouds
Early one morning
It was upon
Women he liked
There was a time
The Green Roads
The Gallows
The Dark Forest
When he should laugh
How at once
Gone, gone again
That girl’s clear eyes
What will they do?
The Trumpet
When first
The Child in the Orchard
Lights Out
The long small room
The Sheiling
The Lane
Out in the dark
The sorrow of true love
Notes
Biographical Outline
Abbreviations
Further Bibliography
Index of Titles
Copyright
In 1901 Edward Thomas (b. 1878) predicted a great future for the lyric poem: ‘Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form’.1 Thomas himself would do much to bring that future into being. He is among the half-dozen poets who, in the early twentieth century, remade English poetry. His closest aesthetic ally was Robert Frost, but he shared significant literary, cultural and political contexts with W.B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen. He was also in critical dialogue with emergent “modernism” as represented by Imagism and the first collections of Ezra Pound. While the academy has not always recognised Thomas’s centrality to modern poetry, this neglect has been offset by readers’ enthusiasm, and by the generations of poets, from W.H. Auden onwards, who have named Thomas as a key influence. Anne Harvey’s anthology Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas (1991) contains seventy-six items. Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (2007) assembles more recent tributes from poets. The phenomenon of the “Edward Thomas poem” suggests that Thomas’s poetry secretes core values, traditions and tricks of the trade.
This annotated Collected Poems is another kind of tribute. The Notes include a commentary on the poems. But their main purpose is to indicate, largely in Thomas’s own words, the rich hinterland that sustained a uniquely intense poetic journey. In two years, facing towards war, Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime’s poetry.
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