Edward Thomas and His Contested Country

Andrew Webb’s Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies opens with a reference to ‘The Patriot’, a short story by Thomas printed in the Cardiff-based Nationalist journal in 1909. In it, a soldier of the British army has a deathbed realisation that ‘his country [is] not the country he had fought for’. Webb’s thesis in Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies is that, in many ways, England was not the country Thomas had written for.

Almost a century after his death as a soldier in the British army during the First World War, Edward Thomas (1878–1917) lives on in popular memory and the contemporary cultural imagination. While he is mainly remembered as a poet, the bulk of his writing comprises natural histories and travel books such as In Pursuit of Spring, The Icknield Way and The South Country, critical biographies, essays, short stories, natural histories, extensive review work, and journalistic articles. Thomas wrote his poetry in the last years of his life, between 1914 and 1917. For this reason he is commonly commemorated as a war poet, a tragic poet-soldier whose preoccupation with place has been misread by some as rural English idealism imagined against the realities of the war-ravaged landscape. The narrator in J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002) even laments the anti-modernist poetic impulses of current writers by asking ‘Have they not digested the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone forever?’¹ Thomas, here, is a traditional English poet, neatly categorised and located firmly in the past.

Others, however, channel Thomas’s literary spirit differently. Most recently, Margaret Keeping’s novel A Conscious Englishman (2013), imagines Thomas’s path towards becoming a poet, his melancholic angst, and his decision to go to war, through conversations with those closest to him and his own thoughts and feelings. In 2011 Matthew Hollis won the Costa Book Award for Best Biography for Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. In it he describes Thomas’s emotional dislocation and the redeeming quality of his friendship with Robert Frost. Then there is Robert Macfarlane, Cambridge academic and celebrated nature writer, whose own work has been inspired by Edward Thomas, particularly The Old Ways (2012). Thomas’s dually restless and rooted engagement with landscape resonates with Macfarlane, who appreciates how Thomas was ‘interestingly alert to how we are scattered, as well as affirmed, by the places through which we move’.² Webb relates this restlessness to Thomas’s ambivalence about place, whether it is figured nationally, emotionally, or culturally.

Thomas said towards the end of his life that he was ‘slowly growing into a conscious Englishman’; Webb argues that Thomas could be classified as a Welsh writer. This revisionist reading of Thomas, positioning him as a Welsh writer within British literary space, participates in the contemporary debate over the formation of world literary systems advanced through the contributions of scholars such as David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova. The latter’s ambitious The World Republic of Letters gives Webb’s study its impetus and structure. He adapts Casanova’s theory of world literature in order to challenge the Anglocentrism of British literary studies, using previously unexplored aspects of Thomas’s writings between 1897 and 1917 and his critical reception as an exemplary case.

In 1827 Goethe anticipated a new era of Weltliteratur, describing the circulation of texts based on a kind of literary economy of ideas. Casanova shows that this economy is not a manifestation of cosmopolitan sharing and benevolent globalism but rather a ruthlessly competitive system favouring dominant nations that have accrued literary capital. Using a methodology influenced by Fernand Braudel’s idea of world economies and the theories of cultural or symbolic capital advanced by Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova identifies three stages in the development of a global literary system: the challenge of vernacular European languages and textual output to Latin and the classical texts...