A poet to cherish

Of all the great but likely less-known literary friendships of all time is that between the American Robert Frost and the British Edward Thomas during the early part of the 20th century. Both poets have immortalised that friendship in their poems: Frost in these lines ‘To E.T.’: ‘I slumbered with your poems on my breast/Spread open as I dropped them half-read through/Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb/To see, if in a dream they brought of you …,’ and E.T. in his poem: ‘When we two walked in Lent/We imagined that happiness/Was something different/And this was something less…’

Frost was on a visit to the U.K. in 1913. His first collection of poems had just come out. It fell to Thomas, a hack writer then, to write a review of it. The review caught Frost’s eye. He saw the makings of a poet in Thomas, sought him out, and set up home close to his. The two went for long walks together. Frost urged Thomas to write poems. Thomas started writing and showed his poems to Frost. As the clouds of the First World War gathered over Europe and the U.K., Frost decided to go back home to the U.S. He urged Thomas to go with him but Thomas declined. Instead, he enlisted in the British Army as an officer. After formal training he was posted to a ‘front’ in France and was killed in action. Strangely he had not been wounded but had succumbed to the shock of a bullet whizzing past, short of grazing his ear!

Unlike his contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas did not come to be known as a “war poet”. He wrote little about the war. Most of his poems did not see the light of day during his lifetime but were closely guarded and preserved by his widow Helen. It wasn’t until the last decade of the 20th century that Thomas was finally “discovered” and “celebrated” by other poets such as Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion as among the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Nearly all of his poems were written during the years 1914 (12), 1915 (57), 1916 (36) and 1917 (1). In the 1995 BBC poll for the ‘Nation’s Favourite Poems’ Thomas’s Adlestrop secured the fourth place.

A poetry enthusiast, I was first attracted to Thomas through his poem As the Team’s Head-Brass …, which I had chanced to read in an anthology. That poem encapsulates British country life during the First World War subtly, yet powerfully. The poem is in the public domain now.

It wasn’t until nearly a century after his death that a definitive biography of Thomas appeared: Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis. It reveals a tortured soul struggling to come to terms with itself.

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