It speaks, and it is poetry…These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets. The metre avoids not only the old-fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact, the medium is common speech and common decasyllables…Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion.14

A year later and now a poet himself, Thomas produced an impromptu joint manifesto as he set Bottomley straight about Frost’s theory:

I think… [Thomas Sturge Moore] had been misled into supposing that Frost wanted poetry to be colloquial. All he insists on is what he believes he finds in all poets – absolute fidelity to the postures which the voice assumes in the most expressive intimate speech. So long as these tones & postures are there he has not the least objection to any vocabulary whatever or any inversion or variation from the customary grammatical forms of talk. In fact I think he would agree that if these tones & postures survive in a complicated & learned or subtle vocabulary & structure the result is likely to be better than if they survive in the easiest form, that is in the very words & structures of common speech, though that is not easy or prose would be better than it is & survive more often.15

Robert Frost kick-started Thomas’s poetry. In his own words: ‘Edward Thomas had about lost patience with the minor poetry it was his business to review. He was suffering from a life of subordination to his inferiors. Right at that moment he was writing as good poetry as anybody alive, but in prose form where it did not declare itself and gain him recognition. I referred him to paragraphs in his book In Pursuit of Spring and told him to write it in verse form in exactly the same cadence.’ 16 Some critics play down Frost’s impact on Thomas. But it was not only his verse-theory or persistent cajoling that counted. More crucially, his practice showed the way. Thomas told Frost on 15 December 1914: ‘I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough.’ 17 He dedicated Poems to Frost. But he also called his poems ‘quintessences of the best parts of my prose books’, and declared aesthetic independence: ‘since the first take off they haven’t been Frosty very much or so I imagine and I have tried as often as possible to avoid the facilities offered by blank verse and I try not to be long – I even have an ambition to keep under 12 lines (but rarely succeed).’ 18 As Michael Hofmann says: ‘“Influence” seems…such a ridiculously, barbarously heavy notion here’.19 A kind of sibling differentiation led Thomas to eschew Frost’s narrative mode, to concentrate primarily on shorter poems. His forms, including his variations on the couplet or quatrain, are more diverse than Frost’s, and more specific to each occasion. Further, to apply favourite terms of Thomas’s, he found Frost’s poetry at once ‘familiar’ and ‘strange’: ‘It is curious to have such good natural English with just that shade of foreignness in the people and the poet himself.’ 20 Frost’s ‘foreignness’ helped to release his own distinctive poetic accent, along with the traditions behind it. All this went beyond personal rapport. England and America met on the ground of the English lyric.

In late 1913 too, after a bad period, Thomas began his memoir of childhood. The task improved both his mental state and creative morale: ‘The autobiography has begun by being the briefest quietest carefullest account of virtually everything I can remember up to the age of 8. I don’t trust myself to build up the self of which these things were true. I scarcely allow myself any reflection or explanation’; ‘My object at present is daily to focus on some period & get in all that relates to it, allowing one thing to follow the other that suggested it. It’s very lean but I feel the shape of the sentences & alter continually with some unseen end in view.’ 21 Here Thomas identifies therapeutic recall with stylistic breakthrough. And he describes a prose that anticipates his poetic strategies: close focus, little comment, no unitary ‘self’, sound and image taking the lead. When he lacerates his earlier prose it is for afflatus that imposes on language, for a solipsistic or derivative vision that imposes on life.

Thomas’s self-criticism, like his criticism, was always ahead of his literary practice. For instance, he called The Heart of England (1906) ‘Borrow & Jefferies sans testicles & guts’.22 But practice and theory fused at this proto-poetic moment. In rebuking Walter Pater (whom he had once imitated) for turning language into static display, for ‘using words as bricks’, he was again exorcising his own mannerisms. Pater’s lifeless style helped him to understand the primacy of rhythm, its physiological and psychological origins: ‘Literature … has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become.’ For Thomas, the ‘music of words’ also carries ‘an enduring echo of we know not what in the past and in the abyss’.23 Poetic rhythm, thus understood, is latent in prose sketches from which his early poems, ‘Up in the Wind’ and ‘Old Man’, emerged.

Believing that salvation must come from outside himself, Thomas sometimes wished for ‘a revolution or a catastrophe’.24 The Great War duly obliged. It changed his daily life, since reviewing and book commisssions dried up.