Edward Thomas 100 years on
Revisit the walks that shaped the life and legacy of a First World War poet who inspired today’s nature writers.
OWEN AND SASSOON aremore familiar names from the roll call of 16 Great War poets commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Few will know of Edward Thomas, who died at the Battle of Arras on April 9th 1917, only three years after turning his pen to poetry. He’s best remembered as a war poet, yet his work seldom touched upon the war directly. Scribbling away in the trenches, he was recalling the sights and sounds of an English countryside he knew intimately from a lifetime’s walks.
Born in 1878 in Lambeth, but of Welsh extraction, he published a collection of nature essays called A Woodland Life aged 17, before winning a scholarship to Oxford and embarking on a career as a jobbing journalist. Over the next few years his prolific output paid the bills, but Thomas was frustrated creatively, and by married life, escaping on long, solitary walks across rural England and Wales. While in Kent, he nurtured the career of the Welsh tramp poet W.H. Davies, but his own evolution as a poet would come when he moved to Steep in Hampshire.
In 1913, Thomas befriended the upand-coming American poet Robert Frost, who encouraged him to write verse as the First World War loomed. After seeing Frost in 1914, he wrote Adlestrop, his famous meditation on stillness and natural beauty about to be clouded by war. At 36, he enlisted with the Artist’s Rifles in 1915, and the next few years saw his greatest poetic output. Tragically, he would never see it in print. Soon after his transfer to the Royal Garrison Artillery, he was killed in action on Easter Monday 1917.
Acclaimed by laureates Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion, Thomas is regarded as a pioneer of modern poetry, and more recently as a forefather of contemporary nature writing. He charted a changing world, but his words still resonate with the walks and places that inspired him.
“Much has been written of travel, far less of the road.” From ‘ The Icknield Way’