But civilisation has estranged us superficially from Nature, and towns make it possible for a man to live as if a millionaire could really produce all the necessities of life – food, drink, clothes, vehicles etc and then a tombstone.’50 Thomas’s prophetic environmentalism was conditioned by his London upbringing and by rural England ‘dying’ as London grew.51 Since the 1870s, when the government refused to protect English wheat against American imports, the agricultural economy (particularly of south-east England) had been in decline. Thomas sardonically observes that the countryman is ‘sinking before the Daily Mail like a savage before pox or whisky’, and that ‘brewers, bankers, and journalists… are taking the place of hops in Kent’.52 From all this, he intuited a deeper crisis. In some ways, the war only intensified the elegiac tilt of Thomas’s eco-history. While he may not always enjoy ‘man’, and recognises ‘nature’s independence of humanity’,53 his poetry invites us to remember what man in Nature, and Nature in man, have created.

‘Old Man’, in which humanity and Nature puzzlingly entangle, is among Thomas’s best-known poems. Here he spells out the concern with memory – personal, cultural, ecological – that constitutes, as much as occupies, his poetry:

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,

Sniff them and think and sniff again and try

Once more to think what it is I am remembering…

Other poems, too, represent themselves as acts of memory or as failure to remember. The words ‘memory’ and ‘remember’ recur. We also find ‘recall’, ‘call back’, ‘call to mind’, ‘came back again’, ‘hung in my mind’, ‘forget’. The importance of memory, as it comes or calls or hangs or hangs back suggests why Thomas so fully exploits poetry’s licence to play with syntactical order. The relation of syntax to line (and both to rhyme) is notable for inversion, reversion and other quirks of sequence. ‘The past hovering as it revisits the light’ (‘It rains’) shapes the metaphysics of Thomas’s forms and language. For Thomas, ‘word’ and ‘thing’ are neither identical nor distinct but marked by their association through time. Further, in attending to the folk-ghost, as to tradition in all its guises, he reaches for poetry’s mnemonic roots. A memorable poem lets the past hover longer. Perhaps his own poems should be called ‘Roads from France’.

It seems, then, that Mnemosyne (Memory) was the mother of Thomas’s late-starter Muse in a special sense. Certainly, he trawled all the resources of his own past. The Notes to this edition quote passages from his published writings, and from his notebooks, letters and diaries. Others might have been quoted or await discovery. These passages, in one way or another, contain seeds of poems. They also cast light on any poem’s origins in a synaptic spark between long-term and short-term term memory: between materials that a poet has consciously or unconsciously accumulated and some new factor that switches on a process of selection and transformation. I believe that Thomas’s intensive odyssey from poem to poem, with its formal and thematic twists, tells us a lot about poetry itself as well as about his own work. We may learn, for instance, that poetry’s sources remain mysterious; that we now expect too little from poetry; or that the academy has distorted readings of modern poetry by favouring surface difficulty. Admittedly, Thomas’s poems have superseded the textual mountain on which they perch, as the butterfly supersedes the caterpillar. So perhaps (to quote ‘I never saw that land before’) ‘what was hid should still be hid’. Yet all that Edward Thomas compressed into his poems can be too well hidden.

1. Review of new verse, Daily Chronicle, 27 August 1901. See note, 169.

2. Philip Larkin, Required Writing (London: Faber, 1983), 49.

3. LGB, 57 [for all abbreviations, see 325].

4. LGB, 9.

5. LGB, 78, 103, 226.

6.