P contains sixty-four poems, none repeated from AANP. Last Poems by Edward Thomas [LP] was published in 1918. LP contains all but seven of Thomas’s remaining poems. The first Collected Poems by Edward Thomas [CP1920] added ‘Up in the Wind’. The second Collected Poems [CP1928] added four more poems. Transferred to Faber and Faber in 1936, the Collected Poems later appeared in a new edition [CP1944], which remained the significant text for many years. Its fifth impression [CP1949] added one more poem, as did CP1978. The current Faber Collected Poems [CP2004] takes its text from CP1978, but treats the titles of poems differently (see below). CP2004 does not reprint any textual apparatus, although, rather confusingly, it retains the textual aspect of R. George Thomas’s Introduction to CP1978.

Thomas oversaw the publication of his poems in AANP and P. This edition thus regards these texts as authoritative, except for a few instances discussed in the Notes. CP1978 departs more frequently from P, mainly owing to ‘doubts’ about how its text was assembled (see CP1978, 38). Such doubts would have been dispelled by the printer’s typescript of P [PTP], which clearly passed through Thomas’s hands. But PTP did not become known to R. George Thomas until the paperback edition of CP1978 (without its apparatus) had gone to press in 1981. Among other textual consequences, since no changes were subsequently made, this affects the titles of certain poems in CP1978, and still in CP2004.

Often when Thomas wrote a poem, he did not immediately give it a title. That can be gauged from the manuscript notebooks, now in the British Library [BL] and the Bodleian [B], in which he made fair (more or less) copies of nearly all his poems. In PTP twenty-three titles in Thomas’s handwriting are added to typescript poems (Eleanor Farjeon was his principal typist). Apart from ‘The Trumpet’ and ‘The Gallows’, these are first-line titles, e.g., ‘Bright Clouds’, ‘Women he liked’, ‘How at once’, and ‘Gone, gone again’. Thus R. George Thomas should not have named those poems and ‘Like the touch of rain’ (where the title is typed) from references in Thomas’s letters. His new titles are: ‘The Pond’, ‘Bob’s Lane’, ‘The Swifts’, ‘Blenheim Oranges’, and ‘“Go now”’. Such references are, surely, a form of shorthand. Similarly, he turns Thomas’s mention of ‘the household poems’ into an overarching title for the sequence beginning ‘If I should ever by chance’. In PTP Thomas gives these four poems first-line titles. R. George Thomas also attaches the generic title ‘Song’ to the poems named by Thomas in PTP as ‘The clouds that are so light’ and ‘Early one morning’. Finally, in addition to the evidence of PTP, a letter from Thomas to his wife (20 October 1916) shows him to be up to speed with ‘the set [of verses] Ingpen has’ (SL, 133). Roger Ingpen, then at Selwyn & Blount, saw P through the press.

As regards LP (apart from the poems already printed in AANP) and six of the poems later added to Collected Poems, titles and other textual issues become more difficult. It appears that the LP editors, presumably literary friends of Thomas’s, adopted two procedures with formerly un-named poems.