Edward Thomas

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 which shares so many concepts and phrases with the first seventy pages of his book. Hammond's book made me remember a story narrated by an American contemporary of Wells. As a young man on the American frontier, this man found himself snowbound in a cave with an older Native American. When he mentioned that they most needed food, Pitamakan replied, "I thought you would say that! It is always food with white people. Get up in the morning and eat a big meal; at midday, another; at sunset, another. If even one of these is missed, they say they are starving. No, it is not food; it is fire that we most need. Were we to go out in that snow [to hunt] and get wet and then have no means of drying out and warming ourselves, we should die." And so it is for me with Hammond's book. If Hammond's study seems to me to be not quite satisfying or substantial as food for thought in some immediate material sense, it does generate a little heat in an essential sense and thereby contributes somewhat to the resuscitation of Wells's literary reputation, which currently languishes in the present general climate of frigid critical disregard. William J. Scheick University of Texas at Austin EDWARD THOMAS Michael Kirkham. The Imagination of Edward Thomas. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. $35.00 MICHAEL KIRKHAM'S BOOK concentrates on Edward Thomas's poetry, but it begins with a chapter devoted to the voluminous prose writings that preceded the remarkable body of poetry that Thomas wrote in the two years before he was killed in France in 1917. In subsequent chapters, too, the prose is used frequently to shed light upon various aspects of Thomas that are being considered. And this is the first point to be made about this book. While Kirkham agrees with most of Thomas's previous critics that few of the prose works "can be unreservedly recommended" (2), he more than justifies his contention that the prose is of interest because "it expresses the same structure of consciousness ... as is revealed more finely in the poetry," that the prose and the poetry both "belong to one sustained endeavour" (1). I do not mean to suggest that the book is of special interest because it examines Thomas's prose—as I say, the book focuses on the poetry—but rather to indicate Kirkham's purpose in this book. It is the "structure of consciousness," revealed preeminent506 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Iy in the poetry, but not only in the poetry, that Kirkham sets out to illuminate. His aim is, so to speak, to provide a comprehensive map of a very fine poet's interior landscape. This overarching purpose determines both the critical method and the organization of The Imagination of Edward Thomas. The book is divided into ten chapters, the first seven of which examine the characteristic complex of postures, attitudes and values that preoccupied Thomas. The final three chapters ("Language and Movement," "The Semantics of Form," "Metaphor and Symbol") are addressed to a consideration of Thomas's poetic craftsmanship, though, as Kirkham points out in his introduction, the distinction is one of convenience. This method of organization has two consequences of which potential readers should be aware. The first is that, although some poems are treated with admirable thoroughness ("The Other," "Old Man" and "Bob's Lane" come immediately to mind as impressive instances), it is more often the case that this or that aspect of a number of different poems are drawn together so as to shed light on whatever particular feature of Thomas's inner landscape is being scrutinized. Which is to say that if one is looking for compact reading of individual poems, a reader's guide survey of poems, this book will prove a frustration. The second consequence of the book's purpose, or rather its organizational principle—the two, here, are really the same—is that Michael Kirkham's study will be most stimulating to those already familiar with Thomas's poetry and least useful to those unfamiliar with Thomas. If a...