Edward Thomas

'Mr Edward Thomas, that curious and enthusiastic explorer of the English countryside,' ran the original advertisement for Dent's 1906 series of books under The Heart of England banner. Thomas's own book of that title, published before he was to become known as a poet, already reveals the poet's sensitivity for language and the poet's eye for truth. Thomas was always aware of the richness of the English countryside, the elusive beauty of the natural world. Everything he saw was something to be treasured. Here is the essence of the England he knew, in all seasons and in all moods: an august day through the haze of corn dust 'when the thresher twists his oaken flail,' or a November morning in the 'Close, perpendicular, quiet rain'. To read the essays collected here is to feel what it would have been like to walk with Thomas - in spring when 'The larks sing invisible in the white May sky' or in autumn 'when the moon is clear, and the tingling sea is vast and alone'.

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work.

Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's. Though a fragment, in many senses it is far more: in the words of its author 'no less than an autobiography . . . an attempt to put down on paper what [this author] sees when he thinks of himself from 1878 to about 1895'. The Childhood of Edward Thomas was not published until 1938, over two decades after Thomas originally showed the manuscript to a publisher. Those eventual publishers, Faber & Faber, were building on their release two years earlier of Thomas's Collected Poems, for which he was becoming best known. This edition includes Edward Thomas's 'War Diary,' a record of the last three months of his life when, as an elderly - at thirty-eight - subaltern he fought among the misery of the trenches. To witness Thomas's childhood memoir and wartime diaries in such close proximity is to have a moving incarnation of his distinctive voice, its clarity and - even in war - its unfailing attention to his fellow-creatures.

Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of Edward Thomas's Poets: Judy Kendall's gathering of poems and letters embeds that brief period of intense poetic creativity within the wider narrative of Thomas's life. For the first time, letters by Thomas about writing and publishing are set alongside his poems, revealing the occasions of their composition, illuminating the processes of recollection, revision and development that transformed him into a poet. Interleaved with Thomas's own poems and letters are works by the literary friends whom he criticised and admired, and whose influence he absorbed: Walter de la Mare, W. H. Hudson, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others. Many of the letters included here have not been collected before or are out of print. Enhanced by Judy Kendall's detailed notes and bibliographies, Edward Thomas's Poets provides a new perspective on Thomas's reading and writing of poetry, illuminating specific poems and revealing the complex sources of his mature verse.