Edward Thomas (1)Recensioner

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.

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.

Fair (mild staining on inner front cover)

I started reading this because Robert McFarlane referenced Mr. Thomas's life and poems, and I found them interesting. The poems remind me of essays my grandmother wrote about the New England countryside, though in this case, Mr. Thomas writes about southern England.
It's easy to picture the birds, flowers, and trees along his walks from his writing. The poems are very evocative of the places and people of that area.

On March the 21st 1913, the poet Edward Thomas set off from Clapham with the intention of heading to Somerset in the West Country searching out the first signs of spring. His journey on his bike would take him through the lanes of Surrey, through my home town of Guildford, across the downs and past Winchester. He heads across a pre-Army controlled Salisbury Plain and onto Somerset where his journey ended.

This is a heady blend of travel, natural history and architecture as well as the history of the places he visits on his ride across the country. He is a keen observer of the things that he sees as he travels through the countryside, spotting flowers just breaking through in the hedgerows, hearing the chatter of birds as he pedalled through a quiet lane and stopping to take in the views, which he relays details of in the account. Intertwined in the book are his thoughts on other writers who he recalls as he passes through areas associated by them. He also takes time to read the epitaphs of people that he never knew and discover stories of others that he comes across on his travels.

The Plain assumes the character by which it is best known, that of a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatest of Time, Space and Nature; the littleness of man, even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to earth.

When Thomas cycled across the south of the UK looking for the first signs of spring, he saw a country that was at peace with itself. A year later that was all to change as war broke out over Europe and men rushed to sign up. Their drain of manpower from the countryside was to change the country forever. A lifelong pacifist he still felt an obligation to enlist for the Great War, which he did in 1915. Sadly his life was tragically taken far too early from us in 1917 in the Battle of Arras.

This is the first of his that I have read, and oddly enough at the same time a poem of his was in another book I was reading, but it won't be the last. He has a way with words in his descriptions that are quite evocative and in other parts, he can be quite matter of fact about what he is seeing around him. This edition includes several photographs from his collection as he cycled across the country and it adds a wonderful touch to the text.

This is a selection of short prose pieces from four published books. It looks like the last piece, A Sportsman's Tale (1909), had not previously been published.

I wouldn't even call these pieces "stories". They don't really have plots. They are more like meditations on situations. There is a lot of descriptions of places here and of people, animals, plants, hills, etc. Edward Thomas was a grand wanderer. I think that these places or situations or experiences were all based on actual concrete situations which he then created a little story snippet to make a kind of frame.

These are a bit like tiny hors d'oeuvre sandwiches. Even the whole book doesn't really amount to any kind of satisfying meal. But it definitely serves to whet one's appetite!

I am reminded a bit of the book Porius by John Cowper Powys. Powys can spend three pages describing the way water drips from a fern, and then allocate barely a paragraph to narrate a fierce battle with dozens of warriors.

Yeah I suppose this kind of writing could qualify as early magical realism. Simple events become windows into vast spaces, through dream and memory and just rich attention to sensory experience.

Just keep rereading.

Reading this I knew little of Edward Thomas: I vaguely remember we did some of his poems at school – long, long time ago – and vaguely remember liking them, and I think I bought this on the strength of that when it turned up amongst Amazon recommendations and was just pence for a Kindle download

This is a book of prose writings on the countryside.

I didn’t believe in it. It read as if he was casting around for something to write about, decided the countryside might be a good idea, but didn’t really have it in his heart, or, at least, not the natural world part of it – which is the larger part of the book.

His descriptive writing was too self-consciously ‘poetic’, too self-consciously whimsical in its imagery and crusted with flowery ornamentation that really wore me down. Over and over I found myself wondering what he thought was the purpose of a particular adjective, metaphor or simile (if he did purpose anything other than ornamentation). ‘Ham-fisted’ came to mind, prose knee-deep in adjectives and with lumbering, awkward similes like wayward giants staggering drunkenly through pensively green fields of contemplative cabbages – oops! Sorry.

He didn’t, even when writing of aspects of the natural world most familiar to me, conjure those little flashes of recognition the best writing does. In fact, I often found myself thinking that such-and-such a tree just doesn’t look like that, or such-and-such a bird doesn’t sound like that, and so on – an effect of the writer stretching too far for original description and falling down.

I found it liberally sprinkled with ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ moments. I don’t mean disagreeing with him, here – I mean literally not being able to work out what he thinks he’s saying. An example, and this is a comparatively short one: I think I would take it somewhat amiss if a wind got uppity and ‘blew softly from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life’ – quite apart that winds should leave the more delicate work to breezes, what does it mean? To use a long-winded and tortuous simile of my own, his prose was often like those little paths you find in ornamental woodlands, that wander in and out and up and down without particularly going anywhere, eventually turning back into themselves (on second thoughts, that’s a much more sensible simile that a lot of Thomas’s).

He often mixed chunks of philosophizing into his descriptions. It wasn’t impressive; it was mostly unconvincing and always tedious.

The work improved somewhat in the places where he dealt with country people, as when he wrote about meeting the tramp who claimed to have participated in a murder or the old man with the tragic love story in his past. There was the stamp of truth about these. They read as if they were, at least at base, memories of real-life encounters, told relatively plainly with the literary whimsy kept more or less under control. The book sparked into life in these places. However, the less directly the narrative voice was involved with these characters, the more the annoying whimsy crept back.

However, those high spots only served to more convince me that the broad mass of his verbiage and foliage didn’t stem from genuine involvement and observation.

I got the strong impression that his forte was people and the human condition, and definitely not the natural world. Unfortunately, the larger part of the work was description of the natural world ...

I was determined to finish the book and slogged on and eventually found it developing a sort of gooey, perverse fascination, like having in your fridge one of those sticky, sweet confections that you have to keep nibbling away at just because it’s there, even though you know it’s not good, healthy sustenance. And, of course, there was always the hope of another of those ‘real person’ anecdotes.

By the time I got to the unexpected Arthurian bit at the end, though, I just didn’t have any investment in the book left to me to wonder why it was there or what, in this context, it meant. I was just glad to be through it.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be re-reading this. There are plenty of much better writers on the countryside out there.

In the meantime, I shall drift away like a lonely barn owl fading into a misty distance like a defeated winter sun declining into the ghostly, soft greynesses of the – Stop it! Someone might read this! Just stop it!!!½

Edward Thomas is now mostly remembered as a poet, or more specifically as a 'war poet', but before turning to poetry in 1914 Edward Thomas was mainly active as a writer of non-fictional prose. He is the author of a single novel. His main output consists in essays describing the natural history and country life in south and south-west England and Wales around the turn of the century. These essays were collected and published in beautifully illustrated volumes, such as about Oxford (1903), Beautiful Wales (1905), The Heart of England (1906) and The south country (1909). He also wrote biographies and critical sudies, e.g. about Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Borrow and Walter Pater. In fact, The south country was written alongside and published in the same year as Edward Thomas's biography on Richard Jefferies, His Life and Work (1909). Edward Thomas admired Richard Jefferies and The south country is at least indebted to his predeccessor in the choice of the title, which resembles Jefferies' Wild Life in a Southern County, published in 1879.

The south country consists of 16 essays about the countryside in England. The language in these essays is heavily-laden with poetic references, and beautiful descriptions. It shows the earliest attempts of Edward Thomas at developing a feel for the beauty of words. He often muses on the poetic quality of place names in the English countryside. The essays are of somewhat uneven quality, and elaborate descriptions force to slow and careful reading. The later essays seem to be lighter in tone than the earlier essays. The poetic quality of the first six essays seems a bit too heavy, very rich and complex. They also contain various philosophical thoughts of the author, or observations he made on his wanderings. The next three essays broaden the view to include descriptions of people, but some of these descriptions appear a bit too heavy-handed. However, from the tenth essay, "Summer - Sussex" the author manages a light, airy style describing various characters in the countryside, while both describing people and nature in a more balanced, and pleasant way.

These essays describe nature in southwest England in a beautiful way, and give readers a glimpse of life in the countryside that was very soon to alter and disappear. Besides the poetic descriptions of nature, Edward Thomas offers up gorgeous characterizations of the people he met in the villages and hamlets he passed through, such as in "Going Westward" where he describes "a thick, bent, knotty man" (...); "merely to look at him is to see a man five generations thick, so to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery of modern man can easily disturb a human character of that density." (p. 215-6).

The south country is illustrated with wood engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish.

As Wild Life in a Southern County inspired Edward Thomas to write The south country, thus, readers who enjoyed reading The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2013) by Robert Macfarlane to look back at the work by Edward Thomas. For although the times, and the people change, we are still blessed with the richness and beauty of the countryside, to which we can turn for eternal inspiration.

I became a little fascinated by Edward Thomas last year when I read the amazing collection of memoirs Under Storms Wing by his widow Helen Thomas. Edward Thomas was a writer, an essayist, and reviewer; who – despite not being obliged to do so as he was in his mid-thirties – joined up when war broke out and was killed in Arras in 1917. He left behind him a wealth of poetry and so is now counted among the number of World War One poets.
This fragment of autobiography which Edward Thomas left behind him when he died was not published until 1938 although this edition which includes some pages of Edward Thomas’s 1917 diary from the trenches was published by Faber and Faber in 2008. I was surprised that there are no reviews for it on either goodreads or Librarything – my sister bought me this edition for Christmas so it is still available somewhere – although I get the impression it’s not cheap.
“When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands, and I have heard the voice of one singing as I sat or lay in her arms; and I have become again aware very dimly of being enclosed in rooms that were shadowy, whether by comparison with outer sunlight I know not. The songs, of first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on the side of it also”
In this small volume of memoirs – as the title suggests – Edward Thomas reflects on his childhood – his upbringing in London, his trips to Wiltshire and Wales. In these memoirs we gradually begin to see in the child – the man that he was to become. Edward Thomas was a famous walker, a lover of the countryside and the natural world, and here in the memories of his childhood we see the first stirrings of this great love affair. As a boy he could already out stride the other boys – he was obviously quite proud of this ability. Edward Thomas’s childhood of course was that of a Victorian child, and his was a childhood of board and Grammar schooling and later the strange and new life of a public school. He tells of walking home bowling hoops and spinning tops, the disappointment of Christmas presents and those many transitory friendships of childhood – that remain indistinct in our memoires.
Edward Thomas was a pigeon fancier – he loved his pigeons lying to parents in order to buy a new pigeon shedding tears when a vile man who was selling him pigeons killed one in front of him to torment him. If there was one thing that was going to make me warm to Edward Thomas the boy – it was the thought of him and his pigeons.
“So I used to enjoy going about with Henry to look at the pigeon shops in Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham, occasionally to visit the back-garden lofts of working men in the same neighbourhoods. He had me in tow and I think I remained for the most part silent in the background unless I had a bird to buy. These long rambles among crowds of working people under the gaslight, in all sorts of weathers, were a great pleasure and were interrupted by a greater one when we stood and looked at pigeons in an atmosphere of shag smoke, grain and birds.”
This is an autobiography cut tragically short – written in the beautifully rendered prose of a poet his affinity with the English countryside is clear - had Edward Thomas been around to complete this work I suspect it would have been a truly joyous thing. As it is – because this is a fragment – a little over 150 pages of autobiography and a further 26 of his war diaries – Edward Thomas remains a little elusive. For me though it is a tantalising elusiveness – although he remains at arms-length I feel as if I began to get to know him a little better – we just got interrupted. Edward Thomas, pigeon fancier, collector of butterflies and birds eggs, walker, soldier and poet – he was known to be a difficult man, a depressive and a loner – overall though – I’m still fascinated.½

An unambiguous and compact viewing of the chameleonic world of Hearn with valuable tidbits deciphering his works and imaginings.

The poems of an extraordinary writer of the early twentieth century. Thomas's work is lyrical, clear, direct, and very, very English.

Familiar landscapes are captured in this book and Welsh music comes in reminiscence to the ear. The photographs are not up to coffee table book standard but the photographer at least was able to chin himself above the stone walls to see the scenes.½

This is copy #98 of an edition of 100.

Cheap paper, dull type, memorable poems.

NA

Believe it or not, I took a whole semester class on this guy and Hopkins in college. I wouldn't have thought I'd be into it- but it really did interest me in the end.

"There are fifty books in this series", it says.

Favourites: “Swedes” (goes well with Charles Kingsley’s “Poetry of a root crop”); “If I should ever by chance grow rich”; “Adlestrop”; “Words”; “Digging” (“Today I think only with scents”) and “Out in the Dark” which goes well with Peter Levi’s “In Midwinter a Wood Was”.