He had time to think, and thinking changed other things. The date of his first poem, 3 December 1914, is to the point. In Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography (1970) William Cooke argues that the war was the main ‘begetter’ of Thomas’s poetry. Perhaps, however, ‘The sun used to shine’, a poem that brings together the war, Frost and English landscape, symbolises his poetic matrix – and the impossibility of separating its various elements. In this edition, the Notes try to track the war’s shifting presence as Muse, context, horizon, and shaping force. One starting point might be a letter from Thomas to Walter de la Mare, written during the August 1914 holiday that ‘The sun used to shine’ commemorates: ‘Rupert Brooke I hear has joined the army. The Blast poets I hear have not. If the war goes on I believe I shall find myself a sort of Englishman, though neither poet nor soldier.’ 25 A year later, Thomas was all three.

Rivalry with Brooke – as regards Englishness, soldiering, and poetry – may have spurred him on. Thomas explained to Edward Garnett that Poems would appear under his pseudonym, ‘Edward Eastaway’, ‘because I should hate the stupid advertisement some papers might give it, though going to France two years late is nothing to advertise a book of verse’.26 Frost attributes Thomas’s enlistment to fear that he had been cowardly when threatened by a belligerent gamekeeper: an event to which Thomas’s poem ‘An Old Song I’ alludes.27 In June 1915 Thomas saw his immediate future as a choice between enlisting and joining Frost in America, where, with Frost’s help, he hoped to find literary work. At that time he wrote to Frost, linking the gamekeeper incident with Brooke’s death and his own right to criticise Brooke’s poetry: ‘I had to spoil the effect of your letter by writing 1000 words about Rupert Brooke’s posthumous book – not daring to say that those sonnets about him enlisting are probably not very personal but a nervous attempt to connect with himself the very widespread idea that self sacrifice is the highest self indulgence… I daren’t say so, not having enlisted or fought the keeper’.28 Being overage, Thomas did not need to enlist. His motives for doing so were mixed and complex. Interpretations that either stress patriotism by itself, or see his enlistment as a version of his death wish, seem too simple. But certainly, he was setting himself a test: a test that fused war and poetry. Thomas later tested himself to the uttermost by joining the Royal Artillery, volunteering for service overseas, and, once in France, seeking front-line action. For a family man, even though some financial help was secured,29 all this might seem highly irresponsible. Or we might reflect on Frost’s epitaph: ‘I have heard Edward doubt if he was as brave as the bravest. But who was ever so completely himself right up to the verge of destruction, so sure of his thought, so sure of his word?’ 30

Thomas’s poetry can be read as the metaphysical counterpart of his enlistment. If at one level it is psychodrama, at another it is cultural defence; while being at odds with the self-sacrificial Brooke-cult, with propagandist verse, and with the co-option of poetry for bombast about “heritage”. The war mobilised his historical as well as contemporary sense of English poetry. The literariness that had blighted his prose suddenly became a creative asset: an intertextual stimulus that works on many levels. In terms of form alone, Thomas runs through the lyric gamut. There are parallels with Wilfred Owen saying: ‘what would hold me together on a battlefield [is the] sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote’.31Thomas’s deep allusiveness tests the best-read reader (he and Frost were sardonic about Pound wearing his erudition on his poetic sleeve). Yet he did not take continuity for granted. He realised that English poetic “tradition”, its language, forms, structures and genres, had been pitched into the war’s vortex. This is partly what Frost means when he says that Thomas’s poetry ‘ought to be called Roads to France’.32 Similarly, France haunts the poetic landscapes that distil Thomas’s experience of the English and Welsh countryside, including its literary incarnations and his own past writings. If his poetry can be called “Home Front” poetry, it exposes the contradiction in those terms.

The founding narratives of “modern poetry” marginalise Edward Thomas. This is odd, given his transatlantic alliance with Frost and call-up of English poetry – obsession with tradition being a mark of the modern movement. Again, the fact that he never met Owen does not mean that they belong to different poetic universes. But American appropriation of the “modern”, licensed by English cultural cringe, demotes “Nature poetry”. Neither Thomas nor Frost got into Michael Roberts’s epoch-defining Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936).