This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues. Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry.

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. This book includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material.

Contains poems, without any commentary, enabling them to be used either as student reference material or as 'clean' copies for the examination.

Here is a portrait of the poet by his wife which has no equal, not even in Mary Shelley's sketches of her husband.New StatesmanUnder Storm's Wing collects all that Helen Thomas (1877-1967) wrote about the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917): the celebrated volumes As It Was and World Without End, her letters to Edward, and separate memoirs of her meetings with W.H. Davies, D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and W.H. Hudson. The book has been assembled by Myfanwy, the youngest daughter of Edward and Helen. Myfanwy includes her own enchanted account of childhood with her father, and the tragedy of his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917. She adds an appendix of six letters from Robert Frost to Edward Thomas.Helen wrote As It Was, the story of her courtship and early marriage, shortly after Edward's death, and World Without End a few years later. In the original editions and later reprints fictitious names were used for the protagonists. In this edition the actual names are restored.The book provides a brilliant, lasting evocation of one of Britain's best-loved poets.

'I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose.' Fired by his abiding love of the English landscape, the poetry of Edward Thomas is some of the most astonishing of the twentieth century. A journalist, essayist and critic for many years, he was encouraged to write verse by his friend Robert Frost. He produced a late outburst of poetry of extraordinary beauty and mystery about the subjects closest to his heart: rural England and its inhabitants, landscape, atmosphere, transience, endurance and death. By 1917, when he was killed on the Western Front, he had earned his place as one of England's most valued poets. This selection brings together his finest verse with his most vivid prose writings on the countryside.

Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's. Though a fragment, in many senses it is far more: in the words of its author 'no less than an autobiography . . . an attempt to put down on paper what [this author] sees when he thinks of himself from 1878 to about 1895'. The Childhood of Edward Thomas was not published until 1938, over two decades after Thomas originally showed the manuscript to a publisher. Those eventual publishers, Faber & Faber, were building on their release two years earlier of Thomas's Collected Poems, for which he was becoming best known. This edition includes Edward Thomas's 'War Diary,' a record of the last three months of his life when, as an elderly - at thirty-eight - subaltern he fought among the misery of the trenches. To witness Thomas's childhood memoir and wartime diaries in such close proximity is to have a moving incarnation of his distinctive voice, its clarity and - even in war - its unfailing attention to his fellow-creatures.

Winner of the Costa Biography Award, a fascinating exploration of one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets. Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of the war poets. This haunting account of his final five years follows him from his beloved English countryside to the battlefield in France where he lost his life. When he met the American poet Robert Frost in 1913, Thomas was tormented by feelings of failure in his work and in his marriage. With Frost’s encouragement he began writing poem after poem as he finally found the expression for which he had spent his life searching. But the First World War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to New England while Thomas enlisted and went to fight in France. It is these roads taken—and not taken—that are at the heart of this unforgettable book, which culminates in Thomas’s tragic death on Easter Monday, 1917. Now All Roads Lead to France encompasses an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Rupert Brooke was “making it new”—vehemently and pugnaciously—and this dazzling biography places Thomas firmly in their midst.

Spring was late in 1913 and Edward Thomas decided to go and search for winter's grave and the tell-tale signs of season's turn - he set out to cycle westwards from London to the Quantocks. Edward Thomas 1878-1917 turned from writing prose to poetry in 1914. His work as a poet has been widely celebrated and admired - Ted Hughes described Thomas as "the father of us all". The Pursuit of Spring, originally published in 1914, bridges the divide between Thomas the journalist/critic and Thomas the highly regarded poet.

From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland, an exploration of walking and thinking In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.