Edward Thomas (1) (1878–1917)

Here's the thing - Thomas' descriptions of the landscapes, architecture, and cemeteries that he sees are engaging and descriptive. But the problem is, I've never been to any of these places and have no reference point, so it's just a couple hundred pages of descriptions of nice landscapes. And that gets very hard to slog through. I'm sure if I'd been through the area, it would be a lot more engaging, but...

I also expected there to be more exposition on his interactions with people, but he very rarely wrote about people that he met. Indeed, he wrote more about the cemetery inhabitants from the 1600s than the people he met. There were exceptions, of course, like "The Other Man," a guy who rode with him for a bit. He did seem annoyed with The Other Man, and at one point after having to interact with others for a mere 15 minutes, he notes his exhaustion and desire to move on. My man is an introvert through and through, I guess. I can respect that.

There were still some moments I enjoyed and I think the closing paragraph of the second-to-last chapter was beautiful.

This is one of those books I can tell is a good book worthy of the reprinting and special treatment, but it just did not engage me.… (mer)

This is one of those books where you have to ask yourself what they can have been thinking when they came up with the title. For most of us, a "literary pilgrim" is someone who travels to visit sites associated with favourite books or writers and perhaps records impressions of that experience, whilst "England" is ... England. For Edward Thomas, neither of these things seems to apply: a literary pilgrimage is a journey conducted entirely within a library, following an author through the places they experienced in life and looking at the way they wrote about them. And his idea of "England" seems to embrace the whole of the British Isles, although its population density fades very fast as you travel north from London, reviving only slightly around Edinburgh...

Not that any of that matters, really: this is a lively collection of short biographical essays about great writers and the geography that inspired them, with a good deal to enjoy, and some incisive observation, especially in the pieces about writers Thomas sees as under-appreciated heroes from humble backgrounds: Robert Burns, John Clare, George Crabbe, Richard Jefferies, George Borrow and W H Hudson, in particular. (Oddly, he doesn't include his own special protégé, the Welsh tramp-poet W H Davies, who would probably have fitted in very well.) Some of the more big-name writers, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, get a rather less engaged treatment, but Dorothy Wordsworth, although she doesn't get an essay to herself, does pretty well out of both the Wordsworth and Coleridge pieces. (The only woman in the book, apart from Dorothy, is Emily Brontë.)

Edward Thomas is generally remembered nowadays for one poem, "Adlestrop", and for being one of the poets romantically and wastefully killed in the First World War. But he had a long and productive career as an author of literary non-fiction and nature-writing before he turned to poetry. This book, which seems to have been mostly written in 1915 when Thomas was already in the army, was one of his last prose works.… (mer)