1Edward Thomas had been reviewing poetry for years before he discovered that he could and should write poetry himself. It was a sudden and short-lived experience: the one hundred and forty-two poems to his name were written in the space of just over two years from 3 December 1914 to 13 January 1917. While there is debate about the degree of his American friend’s influence, it is generally accepted that Thomas found at least his poetic vocation thanks to Robert Frost. It was Frost who encouraged his British friend to drop the prose commissions and literary reviews which, so the American believed, were stifling Thomas’ natural talent for poetry. Frost puts the case in the following terms:

I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under. He was throwing to his big perfunctory histories of Marlborough and the like written to order, such poetry as would make him a name if he were but given credit for it. I made him see that he owed it to himself and the poetry to have it out by itself in poetic form where it must suffer itself to be admired.1

2Frost is no doubt right to assert that Thomas needed forceful encouragement to drop the prose in favour of poetry, and his part in that, if we read the letters between the two, seems clear enough.2 But rather than turn directly to the poems written following Frost’s counsel, I would like to look first at Thomas’ critical reviews in which his idea of poetry took shape.

3Thomas’ reviews of his American friend’s collection, North of Boston (1914), went a long way to establishing Frost’s name in England. But not just that, for the reviews also gave Thomas the opportunity to elaborate his own theory of poetry:

This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry. […] The poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric […]. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets [...]. In fact, the medium is common speech and common decasyllables.3

4His point is that poetry cannot be defined by its formal aspects and can in fact be found in “common speech”. In a second review, he pursues this idea of poetical prose: “Mr Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphenalia of poetry into poetry again. With a confidence like genius, he has trusted his conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply […]”.4 This preference for a speaking voice, rather than a written voice, had become something of a preoccupation for Thomas and informed his analysis of Walter Pater:

On almost every page of his writing, words are to be seen sticking out, like the raisins that will get burnt on an ill-made cake. It is clear that they have been carefully chosen as the right and effective words, but they stick out because the labour of composition has become so self-conscious and mechanical that cohesion and perfect consistency are impossible.5

5Seizing on what he saw was the over-egged pudding of Pater’s vocabulary, Thomas made a plea that literature, and here we may read in his preference for poetry, should seek the natural inflections and movements of a speaking voice: “Literature [is] in fact more than ever an equivalent of speech. It has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become”.6

6It seems fair to say that for Thomas, literary language is nothing less than the acting out of a speaking voice. Now this preference for what I would like to call “prose voicing” was of course a preference Thomas shared with Frost, and was no doubt one of the topics they debated on their rambles around Steep when Frost came to visit at the end of summer in 1914. Frost’s own theory of poetic language turns on what he called the ‘sound of sense’, which he described in the following terms:

The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Ask yourself how these sentences would sound without the words in which they are embodied:

“You mean to tell me you can’t read?” “I said no such thing.” “Well read then.” “You’re not my teacher. […]”

These sounds are summoned by the audile [auditory] imagination and they must be positive, strong, and definitely and unmistakably indicated by the context. The reader must be at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence.7

7Like Thomas, Frost saw poetry at its best as capturing the intonation patterns of spoken English, what he calls its “postures”, and it is these very postures which contribute to the authenticity of the writing and, more importantly, its “poeticality”.

8Thomas’ championing of spoken utterance, in some ways no doubt a re-working of Wordsworth’s “language really used by men”,8 is nonetheless only part of his poetic theory. We must also consider the thought patterns in his poetry. In an early review of Mark Liddell’s unpromisingly titled Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry, Thomas noted the author’s idea that poetry was defined as much by what Liddell called “thought moments” as by the aesthetic arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Thomas went on to say: “He speaks of ‘thought moments’ instead of phrases […]. It is not a new system of prosody, though it makes the old one ridiculous. It affords no basis for a classification of metres; it leaves blank verse, as before, an infinitely varied line usually of ten syllables”.9 What Thomas appears to like here is the idea that sense is determined not by metrical boundaries but by the “moment” of the idea itself, which, translated into poetry, means that line and sentence do not, in fact cannot, coincide: metrical considerations do not describe the precincts in which ideas, emotions, thoughts are contained. In a sense, it amounts to saying that voice and verse are in some ways at odds, which is perhaps a truism. Once again, Thomas hits on something which Frost had also detected, as here again in his letter on the sound of sense: “[…] if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre”.10 Metre versus voice: for Frost the tension between the two is what produces poetry and it seems fair to conclude that such, too, is the thinking behind Thomas’ discussion of “thought moments”.

9Pulling these threads together, what picture do we have of the language that Edward Thomas found in 1914? As yet we are only discussing an idea of language, and we do of course need to go to the texts and test these ideas out. To do so I suggest we take forward two points. First, “prose voicing”, the concept of poetry written around the movement of a speaking voice, as seen in the North of Boston reviews. Second, to borrow from Mark Liddell, the idea of “thought moments”, where subject-matter is defined by its own organic contours and not those of punctuation or line-length.

10To illustrate these ideas, let us turn to the poems themselves, in particular two specific features of Thomas’ style which underpin “prose voicing” and “thought moments”. First, the practice of carried-over wording, where sentence form encroaches beyond (or lags behind) the barriers of line length. Second, Thomas’ deft use of the delicately unfolding long phrase. These features often coexist and are of course complementary in building a sense of a spoken prose voice working to establish a self-contained, even if often elongated and complex, moment of thought. “Thaw”, from March 1916, is a good place to start:

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.11

11We note right away that the poem is a single utterance, whose focal verbs straddle the line break: “rooks cawed / And saw”. We also note how the ordering of the sentence gives dramatic singularity to its final sense group “Winter pass”. In addition, Thomas stretches his basic sentence unit ( “the rooks saw winter pass”) across the length of the whole stanza while simultaneously accommodating two “superficial” rhyming couplets, making the sense of vocal movement and the unravelling of thought all the greater. “Tall Nettles”, again from spring 1916, works in very similar ways:

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.12

12Once again, we note the presence of carried-over wording (for example: lines 1-2, 2-3, 7-8), and the sentence form which unwinds across a number of verse lines, following its own syntactic logic. But also present is another feature of Thomas’ style which he often uses to complement the long intricate phrase: the succinct prefatory (line 5) or summing up statement (line 4). The counterpoint of short against long helps to bolster the sense of an authentic speaking voice, where concision vies with more long-winded detailing.

13Of course it is possible to accentuate the end rhymes in a way someone over-schooled in the formal properties of verse might do. The result could well be comic. But to read the poem in this way is to miss the point. If we take one final example, where carried-over wording and elaborately unfolding syntax are impossible to avoid, the idea should be clear enough:

It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
Or the fallen petals further down to shake.

And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:
Sad, too, to think that never, never again,

Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
The past hovering as it revisits the light.13

14“It rains” is from May 1916 and is a striking illustration of a poem that speaks itself against the shapes of verse and rhyme. True, there are rhymes: fence/dense, break/shake. But these are challenged and to a degree overriden by carried-over wording and the trick of sentences running counter to considerations of line, as in the opening sentence, where the adverb “anywhere”, line 2, and the noun “forest”, line 3, baffle the voice’s attempt to harmonise “fence” and “dense”. It is as if a struggle were going on, between sense and sound, and Frost’s idea of using the irregularity of accent in a spoken sentence to “break” the regularity of metre is particularly apposite here.

15So far I have suggested Thomas finds a language thanks to Robert Frost based on the re-discovery of speaking voices (as opposed to written verses) attuned to concentrated moments of perception, what Thomas called “thought moments”. To expand on this, it makes sense to ask how far Thomas’ poetry is new or original in this respect. This gives us an opportunity to bring into the discussion Thomas’ contemporaries, some of whom were championing the re-birth of poetry in the last years before World War I, based on original and newly authentic forms of expression.

16One group of poets with whom Thomas has been connected is the so-called Georgians. “Georgian” poetry became an identifiable entity thanks to a number of very popular anthologies edited by Edward Marsh published between 1912 and 1922. Implied in the use of anthologies was a definite sense of a movement, of bringing new poets in number to a wide audience, factors Marsh considered as lacking in high Victorian verse. A shorthand definition of Georgian writing might include a preference for homely (above foreign) concerns, a contemporary eye (rather than a historical one), a personal (more than public) point of view. Two poems from recognised Georgians (that is, present in the anthologies) should provide an ample illustration of such thinking. First, “All in June” by William Henry Davies (1871-1940), who has the distinction of appearing in all five of Marsh’s collections:

A week ago I had a fire,
To warm my feet, my hands and face;
Cold winds, that never make a friend,
Crept in and out of every place.

Today, the fields are rich in grass,
And buttercups in thousands grow;
I’ll show the world where I have been –
 With gold-dust seen on either shoe.

Till to my garden back I come,
Where bumble-bees, for hours and hours,
Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums,
To wriggle out of hollow flowers.14

17Second, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.15

18True, these poems are very different in style: light verse versus elegiac stanzas. But they occupy opposing ends of a shared spectrum: home-based, sentimental, uncontroversial. There is a mental atmposhere here which declares home is best, where the idea of “core values” is a never-questioned given. In their different ways, both poems are pastorals for ready consumption.

19How far, if at all, does Thomas share ground with such contemporaries? To what extent does their language look or sound like his? It would be difficult to make a winning case for Davies as kin to Thomas, beyond their shared Welsh origins. Davies makes no attempt to give prose voicing prominence and settles instead for easy, regular rhymes, generating easy, run-of-the-mill sentiments. Emotionally-speaking, it is all rather feeble and conspicuous.

20With Brooke, however, the case is different. His voice, though speaking in sonnet shape, is full of the prose voicings to be seen in Thomas, the sentences working against, not with, the rhyme schemes (see lines 9-11). But, so saying, there is also a basic difference. While Thomas builds his thought moments in what are, acoustically speaking, almost ungainly ways which, paradoxically, manage to return to a focal, final sense of balance, Brooke’s thoughts are consistent, linear, almost dogmatic: the uncertain observation, as against the assertive claim. Compare “The Soldier” to “In Memoriam”, a short piece from Thomas, from April 1915, an elegiac stanza too, in its own way:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far gone from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.16

21For Thomas, the idea of death in war is not one to be taken into a “greater” discourse of heroic national identity: the country cannot replace the man. So while Thomas and Brooke share a stylistic preference for prose voicing, the use they put it to differs, the one seeking to explore perhaps unwelcome thoughts ( “should these men have died?”), the other seeking a homogenous, unified thought in an exercise of great rhetorical control. It seems fair to say that Thomas is not quite the “Georgian”, even if he did speculate he might get invited into the second of Marsh’s anthologies.17 This never transpired and, beyond the vagaries of publishing, there is perhaps a greater reason to account for this: his preference for complex utterance and the “working through” of difficult ideas in, at times, unfamiliar and uneasy language.

22On the other side of the poetry equation circa 1914 there were what came to be known as the “Modernists”. In 1912 the American Harriet Monroe had started the magazine “Poetry” which would very quickly come to define a new and challenging style in poetry. One of its first and most vocal contributors was Ezra Pound, whose bracing and energetic manifestos have come to define a good deal of 20^th century poetry. Two ideas put forward by Pound in his contributions to Monroe’s magazine are particularly relevant to our discussion. First, his belief that poetry should work visually through images recreating an intense emotional and intellectual experience: “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time […]. It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits […]”.18 Second, his exhortation to poets to write in unfettered, organic phrases, rather than in regimented, metrical shapes: “[…] compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”.19

23Pound believed in poetry which harnesses the vivid moment of a given experience and renders it through phrasing atuned to a speaking, rather than a rhyming, voice. This second point certainly chimes with Thomas’ espousal of spoken postures in preference to the patterns of metre and scansion sets. But does the first idea of “presenting the complex instantaneously” correspond to Thomas’ “thought moments”? Implied in what Pound says about the “instantaneous complex” is a belief in limiting the mediation of intellectual control, of presenting the raw matter of perception in as unfiltered a state as possible. I am not aware that Thomas’ writings about poetry or his poems themselves imply similar beliefs.

24Thomas’ affinities or otherwise with Modernist poetry are best understood if we look at the writing itself. To do so, let me suggest a blind test of two poems, one by Thomas, the other by a contemporary poet, customarily labelled as “Modernist”. First:

The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower –
 the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint –
 the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart,
and the flowers are lost.

The cornel-buds are still white
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots –
 black creeps from root to root
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.

25Second:

Bright clouds of may
Shade half the pond.
Beyond,
All but one bay
Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets
Where a bird once called,
Lies bright as the sun.
No one heeds.
The light wind frets
And drifts the scum
Of may-blossom.
Till the moorhen calls again
Naught’s to be done
By birds or men.
Still the may falls.

26It seems fair to say the mental atmosphere of these two pieces is fairly similar. Both poems project a rather fatalistic sense of decline, “seen” in natural phenomena: light fading across flowers, shadows from clouds drifting across a pond. In addition, both poems show a bold disregard for the considerations of metre and line and are happy to employ fairly arbitrary line breaks (widespread / under; one bay / Of emeralds). These broken lines make it well nigh impossible for anything but a speaking voice to take charge of meaning; rhyming has all but vanished. Similarly, both poems share a sense of acute perception following the minute recording of what appear to be gratuitous phenomena. Whether or not we could identify Pound’s “instantaneous complex” in either of these poems is perhaps debatable, but we can possibly agree that both are highly visualised.

27If we want to detect Thomas’ fingerprint, we will find it in the metaphysical conclusion which his instant of perception provides. This is something which Modernist poetry might shy away from: the didactic element, you might say, which Modernism’s love of raw phenomena and experience per se had little time for. The second poem, Thomas’ “Bright Clouds” (June 1916), sees the actions of nature and the seasons ( “May”) at odds with the efforts of men ( “naught’s to be done”); change and transition are perceived in counterpoint to the frustrated emotional sterility of the observer: “Still the may falls”.20 The first poem, Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D.’s) (1886-1961) “Evening”, draws back from such entanglement and seeks to avoid deterministic interpretations of change, be it in the seasons or in the passing of daylight.21 This is not a world abandoned or at odds with itself, she might be paraphrased as saying, it is simply a world of phenomena, just watch them go!

28The foregoing sample is undeniably small, but it seems fair to say it is not untypical. Looking at these poems, Thomas is closer to Modernist writers than has been usually recognised. True, he did not share their interest in writing about the visual arts, nor did he share their magpie borrowings of other languages and other texts. But even if the temper of his poems is quieter and more muted than poems by Pound or Aldington, his concentrated efforts to bring prose utterance and psychological moments to the forefront of poetry make of him a writer, just like the Modernists, resolutely turned toward the future.

29 What conclusions can we draw about Thomas and the language of his contemporaries? Certainly, he did not make it into Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), the anthology which went a long way to defining the Modernist canon. Funnily enough, Thomas did make it into James Reeves’ anthology Georgian Poetry (1962), confirming the misunderstanding that had dogged him from the start, beginning with the “too insular” verdict handed down by American publishers when contacted by Robert Frost in 1916 seeking an outlet for his friend’s poems.22 Fortunately, thanks largely to Edna Longley, Thomas has enjoyed something of a revival in more recent times, and it is now possible to refer to him as being one of a handful of writers who “remade English poetry” in the early twentieth century.23

30So far I have suggested that it was Thomas (with a little help from Frost) who found his own specific language of poetry, one which bears interesting affinities with that promoted by some of his contemporaries. To close, I would like to turn the paradigm around and ask whether it is not so much a case of Thomas finding a language as language finding Thomas. To explain, let me return to the conditions in which the ‘discovery’of poetry happened. These were significant for two reasons. First, the accumulation of chance transformations in his personal life: the meeting with Frost in a London restaurant, the outbreak of war, becoming a soldier, moving away from home. Second, the sudden removal of a number of controls, duties and pressures which had previously ordered his daily existence: prose commissions, working from home, the ever-present financial uncertainty. Almost overnight a life in prose evaporated and the chance of a life in poetry, on steady soldier’s pay, beckoned in its place.

31The point is that through such accidents and the removal of controls, the poetry that had always been there (as Frost had told his friend) could now find its way out, even rush in, if we recall Thomas’ own phrase to describe his poetic output circa 1914: “this unexpected ebullition”.24 The following poem, “I never saw that land before” (May 1916), offers an account of how the language of poetry finds Thomas out:

I never saw that land before,
And now can never see it again;
Yet as if by acquaintances hoar
Endeared, by gladness and by pain,
Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,
The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,
The chickens from the farmsteads, all
Elm-hidden, and the tributaries
Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook
With wounds yellow as crocuses
Where yesterday the labourer’s hook
Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze
That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered; but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.25

32The experience Thomas recounts here comes to him unsolicited. It is the “breeze that hints”; it is something which is “hid” which communicates in “whispers”. The poet’s response must be to find the language appropriate to the event, the “language not to be betrayed”, that is, a language as attuned to the journey in the valley as the song of birds. This might sound fey and impressionistic and it would be inappropriate to suggest Thomas’ poem transcribes the language of birds and trees in a pseudo-mystical way. The point is that the experience is involuntary, “I expected nothing”; it can only be acknowledged and, once this acknowledgement is made, the words, so to speak, find themselves. A similar point is made in Thomas’ most famous piece, “Adlestrop” (January 1915):

Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
 The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.26

33The poem begins with an act of affirmation: “Yes”. What Thomas acknowledges is a name, “Adlestrop”, the word through which the memory of the unplanned halt at an out-of-the-way railway station will be conjured. From here, the experience reconstitutes itself, following a chain of association taking us on an exponentially expanding sweep. As with “I never saw”, “Adlestrop” works by being at first “disengaged”: note how the speaker in both cases is deprived of expectations and finds himself suspended. Once the brakes and pressures of the world of occupations and destinations are released, it is the pleasure of the experience which is allowed to rush in, in this case through flowers and grasses and summer skies and birds singing somewhere out of sight.

34If we recall our opening premise – the spontaneous brevity of Thomas’ poetic career – the sense of language finding him becomes all the more convincing. True, few poems share the unexpected blissfulness of “Adlestrop”, but practically all of them display that studied, concentrated skill where language unfolds to disclose the thing at its centre: Edward Thomas.