Aside from some juvenilia, he did not write his first poem ‘Up in the Wind’ until December 1914. He was then 36. Thomas enlisted in July 1915, and wrote the last of 142 poems on 13 January 1917. Two weeks later, a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he embarked for France. On 9 April, he was killed by shell-blast as the Arras ‘Easter Offensive’ began. Poems (1917) and Last Poems (1918) were published after his death. Partly owing to his late poetic start, critics still find Thomas hard to place. His poetry appears in most Great War anthologies, and the war had a crucial role in its genesis. Yet, since he wrote no trench poems, he eludes or disturbs the category “war poet”. If he looks rather more like a “Nature poet”, his generic range and symbolic reach expose the limits of that category too. Thomas’s art also eludes the critical grasp when it is seen as ‘quiet’, ‘understated’ or ‘diffident’. This is to mistake means for ends.

When Thomas died, he was chiefly known as the author of two kinds of prose: country books, from his precocious The Woodland Life (1897) to In Pursuit of Spring (1914), and literary criticism. Yet he also wrote meditative essays – the title Horae Solitariae (1902) speaks for itself – and impressionistic fictions, such as those collected in Rest and Unrest (1910) and Light and Twilight (1911). He experimented with myth, fantasy and fable. And he could never write about the countryside purely as a naturalist or topographer or folklorist or social historian. All Thomas’s mixed-up genres feature in his uncoordinated but atmospheric novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), based on his London-Welsh childhood. In retrospect, his imaginative prose is always a poet’s prose – soul autobiography that bears out Philip Larkin’s dictum: ‘novels are about other people and poems are about yourself’.2 Its dispersed modes, images and perceptions aspire to the integration of symbol. As Thomas’s prose became more directly autobiographical, with The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans and the memoir published as The Childhood of Edward Thomas (1938), he drew closer to poetry.

In 1904 Thomas told his confidant, the poet Gordon Bottomley: ‘There is no form that suits me, & I doubt if I can make a new form.’3 It would be simplistic to say that he kept on missing the obvious. In starting with an unusual form of writer’s block, masked by his copious prose, he proved the mysterious chemistry, rather than deliberate decision, from which poems come. When Thomas’s poems came, they were poems of 1914, not 1900, although they encoded the years between. Meanwhile his prose was hampered in its original flights by the need to earn money. He had married in 1899, while still studying History at Oxford, because his lover Helen Noble was pregnant. Owing to a venereal infection contracted during celebrations of the Relief of Mafeking, he failed to get the degree that might have made him an academic. Mainly from choice, partly from necessity, and against the wishes of his civil-servant father, Thomas became a freelance writer and literary journalist. His diverse book-commissions included Oxford (1903), Beautiful Wales (1905), Maurice Maeterlinck (1911) and The Life of the Duke of Marlborough (1915).

The Thomases rented successive country cottages, principally in or around Steep, Hampshire. By 1910, they had three children. Their most regular source of income was Thomas’s reviewing for the Daily Chronicle and other newspapers. R. George Thomas calculates that from 1900 to 1914 Thomas wrote ‘just over a million words about 1,200 books’.4 He reviewed new verse, editions of old verse, every kind of rural book, criticism. As living to write became desperately entangled with writing to live, Thomas’s sanity and marriage were tested.