Because of the association through his poetry with a quintessentially English countryside, Edward Thomas has often been perceived as an English poet. But, as Professor Stan Smith wrote in his 1986 monograph on Thomas in Faber’s Student Guides Series, ‘There is after all one major complication to the concept of Edward Thomas as the English poet: his Welshness.’Although Thomas was born in London and spent most of his too-brief life in England, both of his parents were Welsh and, from the age of five until he enlisted in the Artists Rifles in 1915, he visited Wales every year (often several times, and sometimes for long periods) and increasingly saw it as his spiritual home. ‘Day by day,' he wrote in a diary entry in 1899, ‘grows my passion for Wales. It is like homesickness, but stronger than any homesickness I have ever felt – stronger than any passion. Wales indeed is my soul’s native land ...’Thomas had extended family in Ammanford and Pontarddulais; family holidays when he was a child were spent on the Gower; at Oxford, he studied under ‘Welsh scholar and cultural figurehead’ O. M. Edwards; he walked extensively in Carmarthenshire, west Glamorgan and south Ceredigion; he developed close relationships with both the Welsh-language poet Watcyn Wyn and the bard, and later Archdruid, Gwili; he knew and recited Welsh folk songs, and wrote versions of tales from the Mabinogi for Celtic Stories (1911). In addition, as Andrew Webb clearly illustrates in a fascinating essay included here, ‘While several of Thomas’s poems contain direct reference to Wales, and while others allude to Welsh literature, culture and folklore, or are traceable to particular locations in Wales, it is also the case that the Welsh strict-metres tradition informs Thomas’s poetry on a deeper, formal level.’In Edward Thomas & Wales, Jeff Towns sets out to correct two popular misconceptions of one of ‘England’s’ favourite poets: firstly, that he was not English, but Welsh (both by birth and in his sense of self); and secondly, that he was not only a poet but also a well-respected writer of prose. As many readers will already know, the entire body of Thomas’s poetry was written in the brief years before his death (‘between November 1914 and his departure for the battlefields of France in January 1917’). Fewer will be aware that, until then, he had spent his working life as, in his own words, ‘a writer by trade’.Killing two birds with one stone, Towns offers a broad selection of extracts from Thomas’s prose writings that also connect to Wales, beginning with ‘Shadows of the Hills’ (1897), which he wrote when he was nineteen and which appears to be his earliest published piece of prose set in Wales, and running through to ‘Soldiers Everywhere’, which was published in The New Statesman in 1915. The extracts are fascinating, many and varied, and, it has to be said, of varying quality. Thomas wrote mostly to commission and, struggling to make a living, especially once he had a wife and children, he found himself ‘having to do so much against the grain’. This could not fail to have an impact, and it is sometimes difficult to conceive of the power and precision of the poetry coming from the same hand as the prose. And yet the two inform each other. To fully appreciate that, it is perhaps worth reading backwards – starting with Andrew Webb’s essay and the highly informative chronology before embarking on the extracts. When read chronologically, as they are presented, the extracts show the development of Thomas’s style over the years, from the ‘somewhat stilted and gothic prose’ of the earliest piece to the lyrical concision of the children’s stories in Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds (1915).It’s clear that a great amount of work and passion have gone into this anthology, and Jeff Towns is to be thanked for providing a fuller picture of the work and Welshness of a much-loved poet which cannot fail to take readers back to the poetry with a changed sensibility.
