First, they gave them first-line titles (‘She dotes’, ‘I built myself a house of glass’, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, ‘Those things that poets said’, ‘I never saw that land before’, ‘No one cares less than I’, ‘There was a time’, ‘That girl’s clear eyes’, ‘What will they do?’, ‘Out in the dark’). Second, they named poems for a central image or motif (‘Over the Hills’, ‘Man and Dog’, ‘The Gypsy’, ‘Ambition’, ‘The Wasp Trap’, ‘Digging’ [‘Today I think’], ‘Health’, ‘A Cat’, ‘The Dark Forest’, ‘The Child in the Orchard’). At the same time, as with other aspects of the LP text, it should be remembered that the editors may have consulted papers, or had information, no longer extant. In CP1978 R. George Thomas brackets all the above titles as questionable. I have indicated where he does so, and also where CP2004 (on no clear basis) has either dropped the titles completely or, in five instances, dropped the brackets instead. This edition retains the LP titles, together with the titles first given as ‘The Lane’ and ‘The Watchers’ in Two Poems (1927) [TP], and as ‘No one so much as you’ and ‘The Wind’s Song’ in CP1928. The poem for Thomas’s father, included in CP1949 as ‘P.H.T.’, has here been named for its first line (‘I may come near loving you’); as has his last poem, ‘The sorrow of true love’, first printed in CP1978.

There are several arguments for retaining titles that cannot confidently be traced to Thomas. First: nearly half (eleven) are first-line titles. The ms. titles added to PTP, like some titles already in place, show that the first-line title was his default-setting. (Hence ‘I may come near loving you’ and ‘The sorrow of true love’ in this edition.) Second: P, AANP, and the few poems printed elsewhere during his lifetime prove that Thomas came up with titles when publication loomed. Thus, even if ‘To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails’ (‘Women he liked’), he was no purist who feared that a title might limit a poem’s suggestiveness. Third: both established usage and convenience of reference should count for something. Certain poems by Thomas have been long known and discussed under particular titles. Such familiarity was controversially upset by CP1978; more so by CP2004, where poems are identified by their first lines in the Contents list, but only have a number on the page. This is awkward both for reading and for reference. The most problematic cases, then, are established titles which are not first-line titles, and whose provenance is uncertain (see previous paragraph). If editors bestowed those titles, perhaps they felt either that a first-line title would not work (as in the case of ‘Man and Dog’), or that an obvious title beckoned. Some of their apparent choices may be slightly more open to question than others. But, with the possible exception of ‘Over the Hills’, none obtrudes as inappropriate.

Like other poets killed in the First World War, Edward Thomas bequeathed a degree of textual uncertainty to his editors. Editors of the Collected Poems before CP1978 occasionally make changes from P and LP (changes that usually reflect BL or B), but without indicating their authority for doing so. Here and there they also standardise punctuation, adding exclamation-marks, for instance. This edition follows CP1978 in altering ‘to-day’ to ‘today’ etc. A difficulty for all editors is that at times Thomas revised poems, and then (as in the case of ‘Sedge-Warblers’) seemingly rejected the revision. In the absence of clear evidence as to his final preferences, the ear must play a part in weighing the balance of probability. Since some issues will always remain undecidable, the Notes provide a basis for readers to make up their own minds. A conspicuous way in which this edition (like CP1978, CP2004, and my own earlier edition of P and LP [1973]) departs from Thomas’s own schemes is by ordering his poems chronologically. Evidently, he could never have conceived such a Collected Poems, any more than a collection called Last Poems.