To treat Thomas as an isolated figure is also to ignore his criticism, his transition from art for art’s sake to speech rhythms, and his argument with Ezra Pound (see below). His aesthetic, which retains a fin-de-siècle interest in ‘beauty’, is closely meshed with developments since the 1890s. That includes his relation to so-called “Georgian” poetry. Thomas knew, and had often reviewed, most of the poets chosen by Edward Marsh for his five Georgian anthologies (1912-1922). In Edward Thomas’s Poets (2007) Judy Kendall sets poems and letters by Thomas alongside texts by English poet-friends as well as by Frost. The arrangement shows how Thomas’s ‘struggles and experiments in composition’ intersect with his critical response to contemporaries like Bottomley, de la Mare and W.H. Davies.33 But, apart from de la Mare (his most significant poet-friend before Frost), who influenced his handling of childhood, folk sources, and ‘strangeness’, this group is more or less covered by Frost’s remark about Thomas ‘losing patience’ with minor poets. Thomas assimilated French Symbolism, English aestheticism and the Irish Revival, and he reviewed Hardy, Yeats, Pound and Lawrence with remarkable insight. His poetry criticism stresses the ear, as if – long before Frost turned up – he were listening for the sounds of the new century. Thus in 1904 he praised the ‘infinitely varied measure’ of Yeats’s blank verse.34 Conversely, he could be merciless to the old century, as when dismissing Swinburne’s ‘musical jargon that includes human snatches, but is not and never could be speech’.35

Thomas’s mature criticism desires poetry to balance speech and music so that words ‘support one another’, and each word ‘lives its intensest life’. He invokes this ideal to question the esoteric tendencies of French Symbolism, as when a poem by Maeterlinck is ‘hardly more than a catalogue of symbols that have no more literary value than words in a dictionary’.36 He praises Yeats’s more holistic symbols for being ‘natural, ancient, instinctive, not invented’.37 Thomas and Yeats conceive symbolism as appealing to widely intelligible archetypes, and as applying to every aspect of a poem’s structure. This, like other parallels between the poets, marks their common origins in Romanticism. Both poets dramatise the self by manipulating ‘tone and pitch of voice’. Both associate poetic rhythm with the body. Both invest in the mystique of nomadic ‘life that loves the wild’ (‘Up in the Wind’). Both activate the folk ghost by drawing on country speech and traditional songs. Attracted to the Irish Revival’s local, national and mythic frameworks, Thomas said that Yeats was ‘to be envied, like a man with a fine house’.38 Yeats’s “Ireland” influenced Thomas’s “England”. And, while never seeking a surrogate religion, Thomas shared Yeats’s objections to the triumph of scientific modernity: ‘Myths have been destroyed which helped to maintain a true and vivid acknowledgment of the mystery of the past.’ 39

Thomas’s doubts about Pound and Imagism are continuous with his attitudes to Pater and to shallow symbolism. This quarrel still affects how we think about poetry today. Thomas was initially stirred by Pound’s ‘revolt against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry’, which may have remained a provocative stimulus. But he condemned Pound’s Exultations (1909) for being ‘dappled with French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and old English, with proper names that we shirk pronouncing, with crudity, violence and obscurity, with stiff rhythms and no rhythms at all’, and shrewdly warned: ‘If he is not careful he will take to meaning what he says instead of saying what he means.’40 Reviewing the anthology Des Imagistes (1914), Thomas finds that Pound ‘has seldom done better than…under the restraint imposed by Chinese originals or models’. But he calls the anthology itself ‘a tall marble monument’, and compares its prevailing style to ‘the ordinary prose translation of the classics – in short, the crib’.41 For Frost and Thomas, Imagist mimicry of the visual arts fails to understand that the ear, not the eye, is primary in poetry: ‘The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader’.42 Thus they turn Imagism’s painterly and sculptural self-image against it: Frost attacks ‘kiln-dried tabule poetry’.43 Their resistance to Imagism also covers the spatial effects introduced by free verse layout.

Today it is clear that varieties of free verse have not taken over English-language poetry, which moves between poles of “freedom” and “traditional form”. Not that traditional form has stood still (if it ever did). A century ago, Yeats, Frost and Thomas found new ways to exploit the counterpoint between syntax and line or stanza. It is also now clear that disjunctive poetry has no monopoly on modernity. Like Yeats and Frost, Thomas adapts lyrical syntax to relativistic metaphysics. His poems destabilise perception, split or decentre the lyric “I”, ponder slippages between ‘word’ and ‘thing’. But Thomas’s dark forests and nihilistic prospects are in dialogue with other symbols and perspectives, and his questing imagination never rests on any pole. His poetry is radically dialectical.

Since first editing Thomas’s poetry thirty-five years ago,44 I have come to realise how fully he worked out his ars poetica, and how often the poems themselves “reflexively” encode aesthetic principles. Meanwhile, critics such as Andrew Motion, Stan Smith and Michael Kirkham have illuminated the poetry, partly by expanding our sense of its literary and historical contexts.