Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras - by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A very welcome new biography ... solidly researched and detailed ... sends one back to Thomas's work newly enthused, and brings to light a good deal of new material." --Peter Parker, Daily Telegraph

"Timely ... almost a hundred years after his death, Moorcroft Wilson has exposed a man with a remarkable double life, full of melancholy secrets." --Robert McCrum, Observer

"A remarkably honest biography." --John Sutherland, The Times

"The most important biography of Thomas to appear for thirty years." --Mark Bostridge, = author of The Fateful Year and Vera Brittain and the First World War

"Jean Moorcroft Wilson, undisputed doyenne of War Poet biographers, caps her work on Rosenberg and Sassoon with this fine biography of the greatest poet of the trio. Did we need another Life of Thomas? The answer must be a resounding "Yes"." --Nigel Jones, author of Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth and The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front

"Absorbing ... Wilson's book is the fullest biography of Thomas yet published. It's also the frankest ... Wilson gives a balanced account of his marriage and of the consequences of Thomas's restlessness, his bouts of severe depression, his period of analysis with Helton Godwin Baynes (later Jung's chief British disciple), his falling for a beautiful teenager (Hope Webb) in 1908 and his suicide attempts." --Matthew Bevis, Literary Review

"Splendid ... fresh and new" --Edna Longley, Professor Emerita, Queen's University Belfast

"With this book Jean Moorcroft Wilson admirably completes a quartet of authoritative critical biographies including Sassoon, Rosenberg and Sorley ... A century on Thomas's appeal is increasingly a nostalgic one, for its celebration of an embattled rural world, now over-populated and dominated by modern machinery." --Michael Thorpe, English Studies

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