Edward Thomas

31:4 Book Reviews He could project his own fears and concerns onto Ada and thus openly acknowledge them. Gindin's characterization of Ada as strong is ultimately persuasive . He explains Galsworthy's termination of the unconsummated affair with Margaret Morris in terms of the already developed pattern. Galsworthy rejected Margaret because he really feared their relationship, not because Ada seemed incapable of handling it. Such a demythisizing of Galsworthy's life raises a new question. If neither sexual frustration nor political conservatism explain the underlying wistfulness of Galsworthy's art, what does? The three separate and distinct John Galsworthys are reintegrated by Gindin's answer: above all and in every aspect, Galsworthy strove throughout his life to become a writer of great depths, yet he remained painfully aware of the inadequacies of his own efforts. Gindin's book acknowledges Galsworthy's inadequacies but, more importantly , recognizes the power of Galsworthy's achievements. Gindin's first book, The English Climate: An Excursion into a Biography of John Galsworthy, narrates the author's search for and discovery of the facts about Galsworthy's life. Those who considered Gindin's earlier work too whimsical and unfocused to establish Gindin as an authoritative voice on Galsworthy should find this new work a reassuring piece of scholarship. Others who relish the excitement and adventure that are a part of literary research may find the objective, all-inclusive report of a man's life and art in this text overwhelming . In either case, readers would benefit most fully by reading the two books in tandem. Together they disclose the conflation of times and talent responsible for John Galsworthy's contributions to the canon of modem literature, and reemphasize the significance of Galsworthy studies to an understanding of the period. Linda Strahan University of California, Riverside EDWARD THOMAS R. George Thomas. Edward Thomas: A Portrait. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Paper $13.95 Gradually the rain died down, and at last a message came from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another dud show, chiefly notorious for the death of Charles Sorley . . . one of three poets of importance killed during the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.) When Robert Graves made this judgment in Goodbye To All That (1929; rev. ed. 1957), he overlooked Edward Thomas, killed in the battle of Arras in 1917 at Easter. Reading R. George Thomas's biography of Edward Thomas (the two are not, by the way, related), one is struck by the omission. Graves, proud of his Welsh connections, the man who submitted a thesis at Oxford entitled The Illogical Element in English Poetry, the exponent in later years of the White 458 31:4 Book Reviews Goddess, and called by some this century's great love poet might have been expected to be a sympathetic reader of Thomas, who was equally proud of his Welsh heritage, who had published a book entitled Feminine Influence on the Poets (1910) and who had begun a work called "Ecstasy" in which he examined the relationship between poetry and the irrational. But when Graves wrote Goodbye To All That, he was determined to dissociate himself from the Georgians. And Edward Thomas, although none of his poems appeared in the five Georgian Anthologies published by Edward Marsh between 1912 and 1922, was so closely associated with the Georgians that one suspects Graves's critical oversight to have been part of that process of dissociation. Despite the fact that Thomas was a close friend of Gordon Bottomley, Lascelles Abercrombie and W. H. Davies, his own poetry was not essentially Georgian, certainly not if we use the word to designate the slack, weekend-in-the-country pastoral that came to dominate the last two anthologies. Even if we acknowledge that there was more to Georgianism than enfeebled pastoral, recalling that D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon and Graves himself were all represented in the anthologies by good poems, it is still not clear that Thomas was a Georgian . Whether he was or not, though, Thomas has increasingly come to be recognized as a "poet of importance," of greater importance perhaps than the three poets Graves mentions...