Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – ‘When he should have been broken-hearted’, said Verlaine, ‘he had many reminiscences’ – the poetical eloquence of Swinburne, the psychological curiosity of Browning, and the poetic diction of everybody.
Yeats continued by describing how ‘in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts’ in a ‘reaction from rhetoric, from all that was prepense and artificial’ and from ‘what ailed Victorian literature’.13
For Thomas, getting off these stilts did not simply amount to retrogression to pre-Victorian poetic modes. In his North of Boston reviews, he took the time to distinguish Frost’s approach from Wordsworth’s. Frost ‘sympathizes where Wordsworth contemplates and the result is a unique type of eclogue, homely, racy’, moving from ‘a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity’.14 Thomas focused on the present in his celebration of Frost’s ‘colloquialism’ and leaner more contemporary diction.
Like Thomas, modernist writers in the 1913 ‘Futurism’ issue of Poetry and Drama expressed a sense of the urgent need for revolution in the use of language in poetry and literature. The opening article lays out the editors’ position: ‘[W]e claim ourselves, also, to be futurists’ and states some of ‘the first principles of our Futurism’ to be ‘[t]o lift the eyes from a sentimental contemplation of the past’ and to avoid ‘walking backwards with eyes of regret fixed on the past’.15 In the same issue, the Imagist poet F. S. Flint declared ‘Are we not really spellbound by the past, and is the Georgian Anthology really an expression of this age? I doubt it. I doubt whether English poets are really alive to what is around them.’16 Three of Thomas’s reviews, including the Hodgson review, appear in this issue of Poetry and Drama. They are grouped in a cluster that immediately follows Flint’s article. These pieces, published alongside other essays celebrating Futurism and its focus on the dynamic energy of new technology, include implicit dissatisfaction with much contemporary poetry. Hodgson’s verse is praised for its remarkable lack of ‘all weight of mere words, of undigested thought, of mechanical rhythm’.17 The saving grace of John Alford’s Poems lies in their ‘freshness [which] is that of a little before sunrise, cool and blithe and yet solemn’, suggesting a lack of such qualities in most modern poetry, and explicitly evoking a ‘kinship to Blake and some Elizabethans’.18 As in his reviews of Davies and Frost, the Poetry and Drama reviews recall a more distant era of ‘the ballads which were sold in the street and stuck about inn walls two hundred years ago’, when poetry was more closely connected to song, to music and to its environmental context, in this case on an inn wall.19
Other evidence of Thomas’s propensity for poetry closely related to oral tradition, and his belief in its absolute appropriateness to his time and poetic language, is located in his descriptions of Davies’s poems as ‘simple, instantaneous and new, recalling older poets chiefly by their perfection’; de la Mare’s song-like Peacock Pie, which gave him ‘perfect pleasure’;20 and his heralding of Frost’s North of Boston as ‘one of the most revolutionary books of modern times’ because it went ‘back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry again’.21
Yeats expressed similar sentiments in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, pointedly snubbing the Victorian tradition as he traced the ancestry of the successful modern lyric:
During the first years of the century the best known [poets] were celebrators of the country-side or of the life of ships; I think of Davies and of Masefield; some few wrote in the manner of the traditional country ballad … [and] De la Mare short lyrics that carry us back through Christabel or Kubla Khan.22
Thomas internalized his own criticism of contemporary poetry. In May 1914, he wrote to Frost of wanting ‘to begin over again with them [his ideas about speech and literature] & wring the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’.23 Like Yeats in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Thomas evoked Verlaine, alluding to his expression ‘Take eloquence and break its neck’.24 In typical Thomas fashion, he inserted the image of a domiciled farmyard bird with a notoriously unmelodic call, a stark contrast to the wild song of the untamed bird. In order to ‘begin over again’, Thomas was turning to the unwritten vernacular of popular songs and proverbs, and the calls or song of wild birds in their natural environment: such songs as the dawn chorus recorded in ‘Insomnia’. For him, the sounds and rhythms of this environment and the vernacular formed the crucial preconditions of the composing process.
However, if Thomas saw creative writing as emerging from the natural physical environment, he also recognized the difficulties he and his contemporaries had in connecting with such pre-conditions of composition in the domiciled or urbanized settings of early twentieth-century towns. He often described himself as alienated from both wild birdsong and the vernacular: born in the suburbs of London, cut off from the rural countryside and from the vernacular of his indigenous Welsh roots. He borrowed the term ‘superfluous men’ from Turgenev to express this.25 He praised Turgenev’s novels and stories for the high value placed on the vernacular: ‘He sends us continually out into the fields and the streets to men and women, reminding us that not long ago the ordinary man was discovered, and that he is great’, and a passage from Memoirs of a Sportsman, in which Turgenev explored man’s desire to merge with the environment in images of woods as sea inhabited by fish, became a source of two Thomas poems:
’Tis a wonderfully agreeable occupation, to lie on one’s back in the forest, and stare upward! It seems to you as though you were gazing into a bottomless sea, that it spreads broadly beneath you, that the trees do not rise out of the earth, but, like the roots of huge plants, descend, hang suspended, in those crystal-clear waves; the leaves on the trees now are of translucent emerald, again thicken into golden, almost black green. Somewhere, far away, terminating a slender branch, a separate leaf stands motionless against the blue patch of transparent sky, and by its side sways another, recalling by its movements the play of a fish’s gills26
This image of a fish out of water in a wood reappears in Thomas’s ‘The Lofty Sky’ and ‘The Hollow Wood’, albeit with the introduction of a darker side. ‘The Lofty Sky’ includes a sense of imprisonment, as the speaker becomes a fish looking up through the sea of trees, desiring to escape and reach the surface ‘where the lilies are’ (p. 53). ‘The Hollow Wood’, written a few days earlier, accompanies the image of birds swimming in a dark wood like fish with a sense of mismatch and unhappiness. Their voices are discordant. They do not fit harmoniously with their environment. They ‘laugh and shriek’ in contrast to the bright singing of goldfinch in the light on the ‘thistle-tops’ (p. 48).
Thomas wrote that for Turgenev ‘no sentiment obtrudes … his observation is supreme. There is no greater praise to be given to an imaginative writer than that.’27 This reference to ‘supreme’ observation suggests the way forward for Thomas. Keen attention to features of the environment offers up poetic material. With such an approach, the land becomes a way of connecting with vanishing oral tradition, providing inklings of what has been lost.
BEGINNING AGAIN: VOICING THE LORE
Alec Finlay28
As his brother, Julian Thomas, has reported, Thomas cherished a Wordsworthian ambition to produce ‘prose, as he said to me shortly after he had finished his critical study of Walter Pater, “as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant”’.29 This concern stemmed from Thomas’s acute awareness of the fragility of vernacular knowledge, hovering on the edge of extinction. It was present in his writing as early as 1895 in the essay, ‘Dad’, where he described an old countryman:
He certainly had no intention of allowing the old lore concerning herbs to die out. Dried specimens of any sort were always kept by him and roots of many more. Such knowledge as he was full of is fast decaying.30
The