Letters of Edward Thomas

BOOK REVIEWS In the end, despite some interesting essays, the book is unsatisfactory. For readers familiar with the territory, few of the essays offer much that is fresh. The relating of poetry and society promised in the title is not delivered on in a significant way. The much less tempting promise to illustrate the variety of poetry written in the period is kept. But the book seems to be aimed at readers who are under the impression that British Poetry in the first half of this century is a story of monolithic modernism. It is open to doubt whether readers under such a misapprehension exist in significant numbers. Peter Mitchell Grant MacEwan Community College Letters of Edward Thomas Edward Thomas: Selected Letters. R. George Thomas, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xlvii + 192 pp. $55.00 R. GEORGE THOMAS, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales, Cardiff, probably knows more about Edward Thomas (no relation ) than anyone outside the writer's family. He first heard of Thomas in 1928, from a Welsh bard who had met him. Later he was able to talk about Thomas with his widow and younger daughter, whose published memoirs are essential to an understanding of the writer's life. Professor Thomas's own works include the Collected Poems (1978) and the most detailed biography to date (1985). Though others have edited Thomas's letters to single correspondents, the aim of this new collection is to cover the entire range of Thomas's writing life with letters, largely unpublished before, to representative correspondents. Understandably, however , almost half the letters are from Thomas's last three years, when he became a poet and a soldier. To prepare his "necessarily restricted selection," Professor Thomas examined nearly 2,700 letters and looked at another 500. He names the principal locations of the manuscripts and observes that they offer much material for further study. Since not all the people who appear in this book, whether mentioned in letters or as recipients of letters, are as well known as W. H. Hudson, Edward Garnett, and Walter de la Mare, Professor Thomas provides a biographical register. He also lists the letters by date and recipient, and includes two chronologies: of the main events in Thomas's life; and of the works in progress when Thomas first mentions them in the letters. In addition, there is a succinct biographical sketch in the introduction, a list of the books Thomas either wrote or is substantially represented in, and another of the earliest publications in which his poetry appeared. 115 ELT 40:1 1997 All these biographical and bibliographical aids substantially enhance this volume. It begins with a letter from seventeen-year-old Edward writing in 1896 to James Ashcroft Noble, a literary journalist and editor who has been helping him publish essays on nature. Just back from a ten-mile walk in south London—the first of many that will be reported in these letters—Edward avows his great love of the countryside. He says that he hopes to share it with Noble's daughter Helen on their next ramble together. During the following months their friendship will develop into a passionate love that survives the separation following Thomas's matriculation at Oxford in 1897. His letters from the university contain his judgments of his fellow undergraduates—surprisingly unfavorable on E. S. P. Haynes, who will become a life-long friend, literary collaborator, and at times financial benefactor. He is also candid about the way the relief of Mafeking was celebrated by Town and Gown: bonfires in the streets, much promiscuous kissing, and heavy drinking by most of the students, himself included. He has no regrets, though he concedes the absurdity of the behavior for "so unpatriotic a man." While he is still at Oxford, he and Helen marry secretly, six months before their son Merfyn is born in January 1900. The following spring Thomas leaves the university with a Second Class degree from Lincoln College, and, after a brief period in London, settles his family in the first of a succession of country houses and cottages in Kent and Hampshire. Theirs is a pinched life, for Thomas has embarked on a career...