Edward Thomas – författare

Edward Thomas's death in the Second World War robbed the world of a great poet, a fine writer, and a pioneering environmentalist. Published in 1909, The South Country is the happiest of all his books. Lyrical, passionate, acutely sensitive to life in the countryside and the rhythms of the seasons, it brilliantly merges landscape, folk culture and natural history into a record of what Edward Thomas saw and felt as he wandered the old ways of southern England.

In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

The selected poems and prose writings of Edward Thomas, with a Foreword from Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways'I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deepForest where all must loseTheir way, however straight,Or winding, soon or late;They cannot choose.'Fired by his abiding love of the English landscape, the poetry of Edward Thomas is some of the most astonishing of the twentieth century. A journalist, essayist and critic for many years, he was encouraged to write verse by his friend Robert Frost. He produced a late outburst of poetry of extraordinary beauty and mystery about the subjects closest to his heart: rural England and its inhabitants, landscape, atmosphere, transience, endurance and death. By 1917, when he was killed on the Western Front, he had earned his place as one of England's most valued poets. This selection brings together his finest verse with his most vivid prose writings on the countryside.'The father of us all' Ted Hughes Edited by David WrightWith a Foreword by Robert Macfarlane, taken from The Old Ways

Edward Thomas, professional author and critic, was thirty-nine when he was killed in the Arras offensive on Easter Day, 1917. Six months later his first collection of poems was published and his literary reputation secured.These Selected Letters present a uniquely vivid portrait of Thomas's life, from his time as an undergraduate at Oxford through to his final days at the Front. Chosen from more than 2,000 extant letters from Thomas to his family and literary friends - including Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Eleanor Farjeon - the selection traces his struggle to establish himself as a writer, his long and successful fight against depression, and, amid the strain of a marriage which sometimes brought much agony, the strength of his love for his wife Helen. The letters, which formed a key source for R George Thomas's highly praised biography of a poet, help substantiate the editor's belief that despite Thomas's immense prose output and the late flowering of his verse in 1914-1916, it was nevertheless the name and nature of poetry that was Edward Thomas's dominant lifelong concern.

Edward Thomas wrote most of his poems during active service in World War I - poems which search for the true self, and affirm the oneness of all experience.

Since his tragic death in the First World War, Edward Thomas has emerged as a major poet of the English tradition. This selection, made by a poet who shares Edward Thomas's deep but unsentimental feeling for and response to nature, reinforces Thomas's claim to centrality.

Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be recognised as one of the great English poets of the 20th century.Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as a 'war poet', he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war, and whose main subjects were the English countryside and its people, and the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.

When Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 his poems were largely unpublished. But in the years since his death, his work has come to be cherished for its rare, sustained vision of the natural world and as 'a mirror of England' (Walter de la Mare). This edition, drawn from Thomas's manuscripts and typescripts as well as from his published works, offers an accessible introduction to this most resonant - and relevant - of poets.'In his lifetime, he was known and loved by a very, loving few. Now, since his death, he is known and loved by very many, and yearly this is more so. There is in his poems an unassumingly profound sense of permanence. A war came and ditched him, but his poems stay with no other wounds than those which caused them.' Dylan Thomas 'A very fine poet. And a poet all in his own right. The accent is absolutely his own.' Robert Frost'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' Michael Longley

This remarkable anthology is meant, in the words of its editor, for all those 'who like a book that can always lighten some of their burdens or give wings to their delight, whether in the open air by day, or under the roof at evening; for I have gathered into it much of the finest English poetry'. Already established as the leading young critic of contemporary verse, Edward Thomas used this volume to further a longstanding aim - to present English literature to a new audience.First published in 1907, the collection draws among others on Thomas's contemporaries Yeats, de la Mare, T. Sturge Moore, Masefield, Noyes, Davies and Housman. The volume remained in print until 1950 in Jonathan Cape's Travellers' Library series, and, in the words of his biographer R. George Thomas, 'remains an expression of one side of Thomas - boon companion and ready singer of songs among friends - that has often been overlooked'.

'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'.

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.

For Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (1848-87) was more than a nature writer: he was a guiding spirit of the English landscape who affected a profound influence upon Thomas's own writings. From his boyhood days, Thomas regarded Jefferies' The Amateur Poacher (1879) among his favourite books for its eerie capture of 'the free air-open', and as Thomas himself grew into an adept chronicler of the English countryside he would return to his mentor with this astute critical biography. First published in 1909, Richard Jefferies is a subtle account of the nineteenth-century writer's life and an illuminating study of a body of work which Thomas once described as 'a gospel, an incantation'.

Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, in 1878, and educated at St Paul's College and Lincoln College, Oxford. Thomas voluntarily enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in 1915 and was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916. He was killed in action at Arras on 9 April 1917. Since his death his reputation as a poet has grown steadily, but the prose work is largely inaccessible or unknown. His books have often been dismissed as bread-and-butter work by a poet who was able to blossom only when his soldier's pay released him from wage-earning. Roland Gant has made a selection from Thomas's writings on country matters which will be welcomed not only by admirers of his poetry but also by readers interested in pre-1914 rural life. Drawing on nearly twenty books such as The South Country, Wales, The Heart of England and volumes of essays, Grant has arranged his extracts under the headings 'Roads and Footpaths', 'The Lie of the Land', 'Figures in the Landscape' and 'Through the Year'. Interspersed are poems that often distil the theme of a prose description and show that Thomas's strength as a poet is more than equal to his creative achievement as a writer of prose.