Smith, for instance, reads it in close relation to the socio-political tensions of Edwardian England. These and other critics are quoted in the Notes. On the textual and biographical front, the invaluable scholarship of R. George Thomas climaxed in his edition of the Collected Poems (1978), Edward Thomas: A Portrait (1985), and Edward Thomas: Selected Letters (1995). Yet many other letters remain unpublished; the mass of archival documents warrants another biography; and an edition of Thomas’s ‘Essential Prose’ (Oxford University Press) has only now been mooted. Small presses, such as the Cyder Press, have valiantly kept the prose in print. It seems that we are still catching up with Edward Thomas: perhaps because his poetry is so far ahead. I had to write a wholly different commentary this time round, and it too will date in due course. And if Thomas’s poetry still escapes the “modernist” narrative predicated on Eliot and Pound (rather than on Yeats), that narrative is showing its own age. Yet newer critical vocabularies – I will mention three – may not so much open up his poems as vice versa, since the poems got there first.

As already noted, Thomas’s poetry was psychoanalytical before psychoanalytical criticism. Second, on a more public front, it both explores and complicates “identity politics”. Thomas thought that imperialism had hollowed out England’s inner life: a highly topical theme today. Thus he praises Irish poets for ‘singing of Ireland … with an intimate reality often missing from English patriotic poetry, where Britannia is a frigid personification’.45 Hence his creation of ‘Lob’ and refusal to aim his wartime anthology This England at ‘what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete’. But in representing “England” with an inwardness partly learned from Irish, Welsh and American sources, in devolving it to Hampshire or Wiltshire, in breaking up “Britain”, Thomas does not fix new boundaries, just as he does not ring-fence a national canon. His Welsh horizons, which make “home” itself ever unstable, prompt many kinds of poetic border-crossing. He calls himself both ‘mainly Welsh’ and one of ‘those modern people who belong nowhere’.46 Thomas allows a poem’s structures to define its affiliations. He unpredictably shrinks or enlarges a mental landscape or knowable community. This explains why his own ‘intimate realities’ have fed back into poetry from the rest of these islands, as has his historical sense of place and landscape.

In ‘History and the Parish’, an important chapter in The South Country (1909), Thomas writes:

The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of an antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend. We are not merely twentieth-century Londoners or Kentish men or Welshmen…And of these many folds in our nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in Eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher.47

Few poets can match Thomas’s historical imagination. In fact, his post-Darwinian approach to ‘the mystery of the past’ is ultimately “eco-historical”: to introduce a term that will recur in the Notes. Of all the ways in which Thomas’s poetry anticipates ideas that help us to read it, his ecological vision may be the most inclusive. Taken together, his poetry and prose pioneer “ecocriticism”. His earliest influence was the Wiltshire writer Richard Jefferies (1848-87), of whom he wrote a fine biography (1909). Reading Jefferies sent Thomas out into the fields, inspired him to make field notes, and gave him a credo: ‘Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind.’ 48 Jefferies also set Thomas on the track of English rural writing from Gilbert White to W.H. Hudson – another tradition that his poetry condenses. With his equally deep absorption of the Romantic poets, no poet was better equipped to take what Jonathan Bate calls ‘Romantic ecology’ into new dimensions and into the new century.

Thomas’s ideal Nature study would reveal ‘in animals, in plants…what life is, how our own is related to theirs’, and show us ‘our position, responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth’.49 His self-perception as ‘an inhabitant of the earth’ is fundamental to the ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric, structures of his poetry. Thus he exposes the lyric “I” to the uncertainties of ‘our position’, as well as to inner divisions, and (in ‘The Combe’ and ‘The Gallows’) correlates the Great War with human violence towards other species. Asked in 1908 to define Nature, he attacked man’s ‘belief that Nature is only a house, furniture etc round about him. It is not my belief, and I don’t oppose Nature to Man. Quite the contrary. Man seems to me a very little part of Nature and the part I enjoy least.