Edward Thomas

The Origins of his Poetry

Judy Kendall

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783164851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Edward Thomas: The Origins of his Poetry builds a new theoretical framework for critical work on imaginative composition through an investigation of Edward Thomas's composing processes, on material from his letters, his poems and his prose books. It looks at his relation to the land and landscape and includes detailed and illuminating new readings of his poems. It traces connections between Thomas's approach to composition and the writing and thought of Freud, Woolf and William James, and the influence of Japanese aesthetics, and draws surprising and far-reaching conclusions for the study of poetic composition.

1

Starting Points – How Poems Emerge

that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.

Russell Hoban¹

Much of Thomas’s life was spent not writing poetry. From 1897 to 1913, he produced extensive criticism on poetry and poetic prose but practically no poems. His mature poems surfaced only in his last two years. Poised, for several years, at the brink of poetic composition, his writing career is like an analogy, writ large, of the process of composing a poem. Andrew Motion notes of the development of Thomas’s prose writing style: ‘With hindsight it is obvious that he was clearing the ground for his poems.’²

As a result, an obvious place to start observing Thomas’s poetic process is the point at which a poem emerged in his awareness. The importance this initial phase in poetic composition held for him is suggested in his continued exploration, in his criticism, prose books and poetry, of the beginnings of articulation. However, it is possible that he took so long to embark on his later poetry, as opposed to his early juvenilia, because his poetic composing processes began prior to that point of awareness. Perhaps a protracted composing process, leaving little visible trace, was long underway before the poem appeared in his mind and on the page. Investigation of the external conditions in which his composing processes took place is necessary to establish whether such conditions were a contributing factor.

The unusually large proportion of critical biographies in Thomas’s critical heritage demonstrate scholarly recognition of the importance external conditions held for Thomas. These works make several connections between his writing and life, including the outburst of poetry in his late thirties and the onset of the First World War, and, more proleptically, his impending death in that war. The implication is that foreknowledge of this fate spurred him on to write his lyrics, a suggestion a number of his poems appear to confirm.

Similarly, the context in which Thomas wrote seems, like his writing career, to act as an analogy for the emergence of a poem. Thomas published his writings from 1895 to 1917, a period of rapid urbanization leading up to the First World War, and on the cusp between the grand traditions of the Romantics and the Victorians, and modernist experimentation. This was a period also of revolution in fine arts; in linguistics and philology; in studies of the mind in psychology and in the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis. Language itself was under severe scrutiny, evident in Oscar Wilde’s earlier experiments with the spoken voice; the Georgian poets’ attempts to revitalize poetic language; the multiple manifestos on poetic writing produced by the various movements of the Imagists, Vorticists and Futurists; and the keen interest shown by poets of this time in Japanese literary aesthetics. Japanese aesthetics were an important influence on the creative work of W.B. Yeats; Thomas’s close friend and collaborator, Gordon Bottomley; and the Imagist poets. Thomas, the major critic of contemporary poetry of his day and reviewer of most of these writers, also wrote about Japanese writers and showed himself keenly aware of Japanese aesthetics.

Just as a poem before it emerges may hover on the cusp of articulated form and structure, so Thomas himself was on the peripheries of, but not fully allied to, the literary movements of his time. He was closely connected with writers in Edward Marsh’s Georgian anthologies, particularly Bottomley and Walter de la Mare, exchanging criticism and ideas on writing with them. However, his work never appeared in these anthologies and he remained to some extent critical of them. Similarly, his opinion of early modernist work was muted, although features of his writing very much anticipated later modernist writings and, in particular, strong parallels exist between his work and Virginia Woolf’s later writings. Julia Briggs observes how Woolf’s later work is like Thomas’s writing in its revelation of ‘disruption quite as much as continuity’.³ Thomas, therefore, mirrored the conflicts of his time, as Edna Longley recognizes, calling him a ‘radical continuator’ who stands ‘“on a strange bridge alone” (‘The Bridge’) between Romantics and Moderns’.⁴

This image of a man on a bridge is typical of Thomas. The speakers of his poems express and inhabit indecision and indeterminacy. D. J. Enright calls the slippery syntax of his poetry ‘unamenable to high-level exegesis’.⁵ Other Thomas scholars emphasize the lacunae, contradictions and ambiguities in his writing. John Lucas refers to the ‘carefully weighed qualification of utterance – the brooding hesitancies that are unique to Thomas’s mode of spoken verse’.⁶ These qualities reflect crucial elements in the composition process, re-enacted by Thomas in his poetic work, which itself remains in some sense in process, cut short by his early death.

IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: NOTES FROM THE ENVIRONMENT

the water over green rock & purple weed in a cove near Zennor where I bathed & the little circle of upright stones at Boscawen Inn

Edward Thomas⁷

Analysis of the context in which Thomas is writing or not writing his poetry is most easily quantifiable as the physical environment. This is most evident in the note-taking that preceded his prose writing. These notes recorded impressions of his immediate physical environment that were later worked into creative pieces.

He showed concern that this reliance on notes was affecting his writing processes detrimentally, writing to de la Mare on 9 October 1909:

There may be excuses for inconclusiveness but not for negligence. I didn’t realise, till I saw these in print, what a hurry I had been in. Probably at the back of it all is my notebook habit. Either I must overcome that or I must write much more laboriously – not mix the methods of more or less intuitive writing & of slaving adding bits of colour and so on. Bottomley sternly advises me to burn my notebooks & buy no more.⁸

In ‘How I Began’, Thomas recorded how this ‘notebook habit’ reached back to his childhood:

At that age [eight or nine] I was given a small notebook in a cover as much like tortoiseshell as could be made for a penny. In this I wrote down a number of observations of my own accord.⁹

The habit continued throughout his writing life. His topographical or ‘travel’ books were regularly preceded by periods of walking the ground to be covered, accompanied by copious note-taking. As the eighty preserved notebooks that he used on his walks indicate, it became Thomas’s constant practice to write his prose works from such notes, so much so that his early mature poetry was created out of prose versions of the same material as if these prose versions too were notes, sources of creative material. R. George Thomas’s edition of Thomas’s poems cites the first lines of one source of ‘Old Man’ as a prose piece, ‘Old Man’s Beard’:

Just as she is turning in to the house or leaving it, the baby plucks a feather of old man’s beard. The bush grows just across the path from the door. Sometimes she stands by it squeezing off tip after tip from the branches and shrivelling them between her fingers on to the path in grey-green shreds.¹⁰

In her Annotated Collected Poems, Longley notes that ‘“Old Man’s Beard” sounds like a prose poem or prose from which poetry is trying to get out.’¹¹ She instances ‘Up in the Wind’ and ‘March’ as poems worked up from previous prose sources, and ‘November’ and ‘After Rain’ as poems worked up from notebooks.

Thomas admitted to a heavy reliance on notes as a writer, ‘I go about the world with a worried heart & a notebook’, and instructed his wife to file or return his letters for use as notes, ‘I hope you won’t mind if I make this a notebook as well as a letter’.¹² When burning his correspondence prior to setting out for the front, he chose to retain these notebooks.

He received authoritative confirmation of the value of notes early in his writing career. At the suggestion of the publisher Blackwood, his first book The Woodland Life concluded with a selection of in situ field notes, ‘A diary in English fields and woods’. Blackwood therefore set Thomas’s notes on an equal footing with his more worked creative pieces.¹³ Subsequently, in 1907, Thomas made use of ‘open-air’ diaries when editing The Book of the Open Air.

After his death, Thomas’s editors continue to recognize the importance of notes in his creative oeuvre. In Edward Thomas: Selected Poems and Prose, David Wright separates Thomas’s war diary from other prose items, placing it next to the poems. R. G. Thomas included the same diary as an appendix to his edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems, observing that it ‘is carefully phrased and Thomas corrects words and phrases as in all his working drafts’.¹⁴ R. G. Thomas also wrote that the diary

seems to contain the germs of ideas, books, and poems that were never to be written but that were surely present in his mind. Even more clearly it reveals the consistency of the poet’s entire writing life grounded as that was upon his powerful sensuous response to the world of living and natural things.¹⁵

In the preface to The Icknield Way, Edward Thomas makes clear that his notes, taken while travelling along the Icknield Way, are not merely preparatory but integral to the composition process. He observes how, in the course of writing the book, both the ancient road and his physical journey along it become images of the book’s composition process. The Icknield Way is ‘in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop.’¹⁶ His composing process starts, literally as well as metaphorically, ‘many miles’ before he actually begins to write the book, initiating with his travels along the road; the notes he takes during this journey; and the ways in which the subject matter and style of those notes are affected by the journey. The environment and the composing process are closely entwined. Thomas’s awareness of this comes to fruition in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written in 1914 although not published until 1917. This book observes the close relation between the composing activity of a disparate number of poets and their environment. They include, among others, Matthew Arnold, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, George Borrow, Emily Brontë, Robert Burns, William Cobbett, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt, Robert Herrick, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, P. B. Shelley, A. C. Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth.

Thomas’s poems also relate closely to the environment. They refer to journeys, roads and the dark, conditions in which many were drafted. He told Frost that ‘I sometimes write in [sic] the train going home late’, and described to Farjeon the ‘long slow’ train journeys from military camp.¹⁷ The length of these journeys is mirrored in the winding, clause-ridden sentence constructions of poems such as ‘The Owl’, ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘It was upon’ and ‘I never saw that land before’. The rapidly changing perspectives in ‘The Barn and the Down’ also suggest a train journey:

Then the great down in the west
Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;

And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness. (pp. 68–9)

Similarly, Thomas wrote ‘Roads’, an exploration of roads, while travelling home.

R. G. Thomas recognized the connection in Edward Thomas’s work between physical environment and poem when he observed that the ‘train journey home [from military camp] was long and roundabout and two poems at least, “The Child in the Orchard” and “Lights Out”, were worked on in semi-darkness’.¹⁸ As Thomas told Farjeon, he began writing ‘Lights Out’ while ‘coming down in the train on a long dark journey when people were talking and I wasn’t’.¹⁹ Lack of light is present not only in the poem’s title, but in the sense of blurred vision and silent isolation in stanzas that describe entering a dark forest,

the unknown

I must enter and leave alone, (p. 136)

The almost mnemonic repeated lines and nursery-rhyme-like echoes of ‘The Child in the Orchard’ ...