Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
nearer.’35 Most often he seemed bent on widening the gap between his work and conventional expectations of rhythm and rhyme, as if celebrating the ambiguous inception of this work, which remained beyond his control, dependent on the physical environment in which he happened to be placed.
IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: THOMAS ON HOW HIS POEMS EMERGE
I need to be in a position to write when writing comes.
Carol Ann Duffy36
Thomas’s poems and their composing processes have an unplanned air, an air he courted and fostered, as suggested in his references to his habit of note-taking. He stressed the primacy of the environment and its role in dictating the form and style of notes made within it. The notes were written as responses, and he re-read them because of their ability to evoke the environment. This allowed him to write further and produce a completed creative piece. Their main purpose is revealed in his lament: ‘One little note used to recall to me much of the glory or joy of former days out of doors. Now it is barren.’37
Thomas’s words suggest that he saw the beginnings of the composing process as lying in the experience of the environment, not in notes on it. He was moving towards the extreme claim that human language has developed from man’s relation with his environment and depends upon that relationship. In terms of poetic composition, this implies that the composing process commences with the poet’s interaction with the environment. In ‘Reading out of doors’, he developed this idea, tentatively positing not man but the environment as the initiator of the creative process:
I have ever found that my own thoughts, or those which the landscape and the air thought for me, were far beyond the range of such as they [Spenser, Wordsworth, Thoreau]. There is more wisdom in the amber maple leaf or the poise of a butterfly or the silence of a league of oaks than in all the poems of Wordsworth.38
This passage implies that the ‘landscape and the air’ are not merely conditions existing before language and from which language springs. They offer the first moments of the creation of that language. To some degree they write the creative work that follows, thinking the writer’s thoughts for him with a ‘wisdom’ to be favoured over that in a Wordsworth poem, the writer’s role in this process being that of amanuensis.
If, as Thomas suggested, the composition processes begin in the environment, then further examination of such processes necessarily entails focus upon experience of the environment. This is exactly what happens in his account of poetic composition in the essay ‘Insomnia’.
Comparison with a letter Thomas wrote to Walter de la Mare in 1913 makes clear that the account of composing in ‘Insomnia’ is to a great degree autobiographical. It matches detail for detail the description of attempted poetry composition in the de la Mare letter.39 In both, the speaker is a ‘non-poet’ who, suffering insomnia, finds himself trying to write a poem that reflects his mood. Failing to complete the first verse, he remains plagued by the rhyme of ‘ember’ and ‘September’.40
The significance of ‘Insomnia’ to Thomas’s composition processes and to a more accurate understanding of the chronology of those processes is so crucial that it will be examined from several angles in the course of this book. It is worth therefore spending some time detailing the conditions and date of composition of this essay.
Most critics and biographers of Thomas date the inception of his mature poetry to late 1914. However, an examination of the accounts of composing in ‘Insomnia’ and the related letter to de la Mare point to an earlier start date for his first mature attempt at poetry. This is an incomplete attempt since the poet gives up after three lines. Nevertheless, it comprises a highly significant record of his first moments of poetic composition.
The exact date of ‘Insomnia’ remains unknown. However, it can be assumed that it was written after the de la Mare letter, since the letter contains the germ of the essay. The letter, although undated, was almost certainly written in the later months of 1913. Penned on notepaper headed ‘Selsfield House’, it has been filed in the Bodleian manuscripts between letters dated end of October 1913 and 2 January 1914, a period when Thomas was staying at Selsfield House. However, a much more likely date lies between 5 and 13 September 1913, since both letter and essay refer to the month of September, and letters to Farjeon confirm that Thomas was also staying at Selsfield House at this time. Discussion in the de la Mare letter of Thomas’s arrangements to meet de la Mare suggest it was written on Sunday, 7 September, the date mentioned at the end of ‘Insomnia’: ‘And so I fell asleep again on the seventh of September’.
This proof that Thomas’s first foray into mature poetry occurred in late 1913 affects the commonly accepted view that his attempts at mature poetry were largely instigated by Robert Frost in the summer of 1914. Instead, it acknowledges the contributory influence on Thomas of other poet friends, such as de la Mare.
In a letter to W. H. Hudson, Thomas named November 1914 as a start date for his mature poetic compositions. He appeared to have forgotten or to discount his earlier failed experience of poetic composition, writing of his first successfully completed poems that they had
all been written since November [1914]. I had done no verses before and did not expect to and merely became nervous when I thought of beginning. But when it came to beginning I slipped into it naturally whatever the results.41
The unsuccessful attempt recorded in ‘Insomnia’ and the de la Mare letter has been relegated to an experience of feeling ‘nervous when I thought of beginning’. This dismissive reference, however, was written in 1915 after Thomas had successfully completed many poems. The 1913 letter to de la Mare, written before Thomas’s poetry had begun to flow, records in detail the earlier attempt at poetic composition, suggesting that at the time he saw it as highly significant.
A second indication of Thomas’s awareness of the significance of this attempt lies in his decision to communicate it to de la Mare. He held de la Mare in very high regard, particularly esteeming his poetry collection Peacock Pie, which he was reading in the summer of 1913, and later rated him ‘second [to Frost] among all living poets’.42 Thomas had long been in the habit of sharing his writing ideas with de la Mare. They worked closely on creative compositions, de la Mare sending Thomas his own poetry for comments and advice. Theresa Whistler records how they agreed to write stories on the same topic of time, Thomas publishing his story in 1911 and de la Mare writing his in 1917.43 They shared creative material, such as accounts of dreams, a frequent source of creativity for de la Mare, and also for Thomas, as his 1915 poem ‘A Dream’ bears witness. A 29 March 1911 letter to de la Mare, describing a dream, concludes with the words ‘this is my copyright’, showing a keen awareness in Thomas of the potential of dreams as creative material.44
Although in 1913 Thomas was in awe of de la Mare’s poetic gift, in the following approximation of the spacing in the handwriting of the September 1913 letter, Thomas described his friend, in a rephrasing of Pope’s words, as one of those
mob of gentlemen that rhyme
with ease. 45
The word ‘rhyme’ is Thomas’s choice, not Pope’s, and the idiosyncratically spaced handwriting emphasizes this word, as does its position at the end of the line. The spacing frames, and therefore isolates, the word ‘gentlemen’, which, presented thus, suggests an apparently select group of poets, a group from which Thomas excluded himself.46
Previously, this sense of exclusion as a writer was very strong in Thomas. In 1909 he wrote to Bottomley: ‘By comparison with others that I know – like de la Mare – I seem essentially like the other men in the train & I should like not to be.’47 However, by 1913, Thomas’s view of himself had changed subtly. He showed greater confidence in his writing abilities, as indicated by the fact that he replaced Pope’s ‘wrote’ with ‘rhyme’, suggesting awareness of his own possible gift as poet. Also, these lines denigrate not Thomas but the ‘mob of gentlemen’. Thomas’s exclusion has become a position of choice, not regret. The ‘ease’ with which the ‘mob of gentlemen’, poets such as de la Mare, ‘rhyme’ is perhaps too easy and not altogether