In February 1905 he told Bottomley: ‘My great enemy is physical exhaustion which makes my brain so wild that I am almost capable of anything & fear I shall one day prove it.’ In January 1906 he lamented: ‘Oh, I have lost my very last chances of happiness, gusto & leisure now. I am swallowed up. I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9 a.m. until 1 a.m. It takes me so long because I fret & fret…My self criticism or rather my studied self contempt is now nearly a disease.’ If such complaints have a theatrical tinge – in December 1912 Thomas described himself as ‘advertising my sorrows & decimating my friends’ – that, too, was part of the ‘disease’.5 Eleanor Farjeon (who loved him) warned a biographer: ‘remember that when his moods weren’t on him like a sickness, when his nerves weren’t harassed by overwork and anxiety…he was among other things the best talker, the best thinker, the most humorous…His power of friendship was as great as his need of it’.6

Yet on the face of it, and despite Helen Thomas’s devotion, early marriage was disastrous for a writer who needed creative space. There may have been an underlying mental problem: Thomas refers to ‘something wrong at the very centre which nothing deliberate can put right’.7 But the neurotic symptoms that his letters ‘advertise’ are bound up with financial worry, domestic claustrophobia, overwork, fear of not getting work, dislike of hustling for work, all compounded by his sense of betraying ‘my silly little deformed unpromising bantling of originality’.8 At certain periods he used opium for relief that may have made things worse: ‘I have sent up strange melodies of agony to many a moon’.9 In January 1908 Thomas found another problematic form of relief in his obsession with a briefly-met young girl who haunts his love poetry. He often brooded on suicide: in November 1908 he took a revolver for a walk; in October 1913 Walter de la Mare had to talk him out of a suicidal ‘design’. Thomas told de la Mare afterwards: ‘I think I have now changed my mind though I have the Saviour in my pocket.’ 10 He also suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Several doctors tried to treat what he calls ‘melancholy’ or ‘depression’. In 1912 the most effective doctor, Godwin Baynes, introduced him to psychoanalysis. This helped Thomas to understand his symptoms: ‘the central evil is self-consciousness carried as far beyond selfishness as selfishness is beyond self denial…and all I have got to fight it with is the knowledge that in truth I am not the isolated selfconsidering brain which I have come to seem – the knowledge that I am something more, but not the belief that I can reopen the connection between the brain and the rest’.11

Although Baynes’s own impact dwindled, psychoanalytic principles would influence Thomas’s poetic structures. It was poetry that ‘re-opened the connection’ or opened, at least, a series of channels. As therapy, it lacked the downside that Thomas feared when he wondered ‘whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?’ 12 Some of his early poems imply their own emergence from incoherence. ‘The Other’ begins: ‘The forest ended’. Thomas adapts the ‘myriad-minded’ lyric to dialogue between different voices, different selves, the roles of patient and analyst. His poetry revisits conflicts manifested in his letters and diaries (conflicts that did not, indeed, vanish overnight), but with a new power to objectify them as psychodrama. Like another troubled poet Sylvia Plath, if by different means, he recasts his subjectivity from poem to poem. Yet Thomas’s poems are not ‘about himself’ in a reductive sense. Nor are they ‘himself’ in the sense that they put a fragmented psyche together again. Autobiography or case-history is only where his poetry starts. When ‘The Other’ enters the unconscious and dramatises splits within the psyche, it marks the start of a poetic movement that will internalise the perplexities of modern selfhood.

But why did poetry come, or come to the rescue, in December 1914? Eight years before, Thomas had told Bottomley: ‘I feel sure that my salvation depends on a person’.13 The American poet Robert Frost, whom Thomas first met in October 1913, turned out to be a true ‘saviour’. Psychological, intellectual and aesthetic affinities explain the rapid advance of their friendship. Frost periodically suffered from depression. He was a sceptical post-Darwinian thinker, with residual mystical inclinations, who had deeply absorbed the Romantic poets and Thomas Hardy. His American precursors, Emerson and Thoreau, had been formative writers for Thomas too. Frost’s imagined New Hampshire, like Thomas’s old Hampshire, was a tree-landscape with dark vistas and enigmatic inhabitants. And Frost’s ideas about speech and poetry, which centred on the ‘sentence-sound’, were akin to those that Thomas had started to develop in Walter Pater: A Critical Study (1914). Aged 39, four years older than Thomas, Frost had yet received little acclaim at home. Thomas, by then an influential poetry critic, largely made Frost’s reputation in England and hence in the US. He wrote of Frost’s second collection, North of Boston:

This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive.