The Imagination of Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was perhaps the most accomplished of the English poets who died in the 1914-18 war. Much of his poetry was written in the three years leading up to his death. He saw himself as an ‘isolated, self-considering brain’, seeking to ‘reopen the connection’ between himself and the world. The author shows this reconnection taking place in his poetry and to some extent in his imaginative prose. On the one hand there is the solitary melancholic immured in the prison of his ‘self-consciousness’, whose awareness of lost connections in his personal life extended to a general sense of loss; and on the other, there is the man struggling to escape the limitations of his personality and make connections with the world of others and the natural world from both of which he derives his values. Professor Kirkham has produced a thorough and fascinating study of these contradictions, exploring in detail Thomas’s values, his imaginative world, and his poetic craftsmanship, and relating these to the preoccupations of the troubled era, in which he wrote, lived and died.