Nature’s poet POETIC ENCOUNTERS

A century ago, war took the life of Edward Thomas, one of Britain’s greatest nature writers. But his luminous poetry and prose attracts admirers to this day. Anna Stenning tells his story

Edward Thomas is often remembered as a war poet, and for the sadness that afflicted him for much of his life. Yet his writing is often concerned with the happiness he found in nature and rural places. His countryside books and poetry display an almost religious devotion to the life of the fields and hedgerows.

Born to Welsh parents, Thomas had a happy-go-lucky childhood in a house full of boys and animals, folk song and Arthurian legends. His home was in Victorian Wandsworth, southwest London, yet at a young age he became enthralled by the writings of Richard Jefferies, a squire’s son from Wiltshire, who wrote about hunting, fishing, wildlife and country people.

On the edges of London, the young Thomas began to explore nature, and visited family in the countryside around Swindon, Glamorgan and west Wales. These experiences were the origin of Thomas’s first collection of countryside essays, The Woodland Life, published in 1897, when Thomas was 19 years old.

Inspired by this early writing success, Thomas rejected a career alongside his father in the civil service. By the time he was 20, he was married and writing books and literary reviews to order. From 1897 to 1917 he published more than two dozen books, including travel, nature writing, biography and fiction.

His disposition and demanding work led to his first depressive episodes. Regularly walking 25 miles in a day seems to have soothed his mind. “Calming us with its space and patience,” he wrote, “the country relates us all to Eternity. We go to it… to escape ourselves.” He had a talent for humour, displayed in an occasional penchant for bawdy folk songs. Far from being a reclusive, misanthropic nature writer, he was a popular member of many artistic circles, including the Dymock poets in Gloucestershire, and was a friend and mentor to the tramp poet WH Davies.

From 1905, Thomas lived on a farm in Sevenoaks, Kent, with his wife and children. He and his family later moved ABOVE Though raised in London, Edward Thomas was inspired by the countryside, and loved the Hampshire Downs to Steep, near Petersfield, attracted by the progressive Bedales community there, and he grew to love the easterly downs of Hampshire. In his 30s, Thomas met two people who rescued him from severe depression by convincing him to take up poetry: the young writer Eleanor Farjeon, and the American poet Robert Frost. There followed just over two years of fruitful work that sealed his legacy. Between December 1914 and January 1917, Thomas completed 139 poems. This was enough to be regarded as the source of a new lyric style that influenced many subsequent poets. Poet Laureate Ted Hughes described him as “the father of us all”.

In 1915, aged 37, Edward Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles. He felt no hatred for the Central Powers, but was obliged by his sense of duty and the need to support his family. His earlier explorations allowed him to teach map-reading with the regiment.

He wrote poetry right up to his departure for the front lines, which often conveyed the impact of mass mobilisation on the countryside. At the front, he served as a forward observer for the Royal Garrison Artillery. His war diary notes that blackbirds began their alarm calls once shelling stopped, and that yarrow had started to colonise his dug out.

He was killed on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, during the Battle of Arras. His wife Helen was told that he was killed by a blast wave from a shell, with no mark on his body, but a recently unearthed letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington reveals he was shot “clean through the chest”.

To the end, Thomas sought to understand man’s place in nature.