Edward Thomas's Poets

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.

Edward Thomas was born in London in 1878 and was educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College Oxford. He published his first book, a collection of essays on the country, in 1896, with the encouragement of the critic James Ashcroft Noble. In 1899, while he was still an undergraduate, Thomas married Helen Noble (1877-1967), the daughter of his mentor. Their son Mervyn was born in 1900 and their elder daughter Bronwen in 1903. Myfanwy Thomas, their third child, was born in 1910. The family moved house frequently, but from 1906 lived in or near Petersfield, Hampshire, an area whose landscape was to have a strong influence on Thomas's poetry. Thomas sought to make a living as a writer, reviewing and publishing essays, anthologies, biographies, guidebooks and country writing. In 1913 his autobiographical novel The Happy-go-lucky Morgans was published. He also began to write poetry, but the strain of reconciling his own creativity with the need to earn enough to support his family created periods of deep depression during these years. In 1913 Thomas met Robert Frost, a friendship that was of profound importance to his own poetry. In 1915 Thomas enlisted in the Artists' Rifles, transferring a year later to the Royal Artillery, where he trained as a map-reading instructor and was commissioned second lieutenant. He volunteered for service overseas and was posted to France in January 1917. On 9 April Thomas was killed at the battle of Arras. His poetry was published posthumously: Poems (1917) under his pseudonym, Edward Eastaway, Last Poems in 1918 and his Collected Poems in 1920. Helen Thomas's accounts of her life with Thomas in As it Was (1926) and World without End (1931) were published with Myfanwy Thomas's memoir of her childhood as Under Storm's Wing (Carcanet Press, 1988). Dr Judy Kendall is Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University. She has edited two collections of Edward Thomas's letters and poems, Edward Thomas's Poets (Carcanet, 2007), and Edward Thomas's Letters to Walter de la Mare(Seren, 2012), which was listed in the Guardian round up of Best Books of 2012. Her two monographs on Edward Thomas are Edward Thomas: the origins of his poetry(University of Wales Press, 2012) and Edward Thomas: Birdsong and Flight (Cecil Woolf War Poet Series, 2014) which was listed in the Guardian round up of Best Nature Books of 2014. She has a special interest in Visual text and co-edited the special Visual Text issue of 2013 European Journal of English Studies, as well as writing extensively on aspects of visual text in both her Edward Thomas monographs, and on the use of textual and graphic effects in critical writing and reading in the 2013 Manchester University Press, Writing Otherwise. She has also written extensively on translation and is currently working on the subject of linguistic innovations in African Englishes in African literature in English. She is an award-winning poet, and has four collections with Cinnamon Press, the most recent being a collection of visual gardening poetry, insatiable carrot (2015). The others are The Drier The Brighter (2007), nominated for the Forward First Collection award, Joy Change (2010) and climbing postcards (2012), nominated for the Boardman Tasker mountain literature award. Her poems have featured in the Forward best single poems anthologies of 2007, 2010 and Best Poems of the First Decade of the 21st Century.