Edward Thomas can be seen as the most important poetry critic in the early twentieth century. Thomas was a prose-writer before he was a poet. The Selected Edition of his prose, and especially this volume, shows that he was also a critic before he was a poet. His unusual literary career opens up key questions about the relation between poetry and criticism, as well as between poetry and prose. Thomas wrote books about poetry, but his criticism mainly took the form of reviews. He reviewed collections, editions, and studies of poetry, most regularly, for the Daily Chronicle and the Morning Post. These reviews amount to a unique commentary on the state of poetry and of poetry criticism after 1900. Since reviewing provided Thomas's main income, he also reviewed other kinds of book. Hence the sheer mass of his reviews, the stress he suffered as a literary journalist. Yet his criticism maintains an astonishingly high standard. Thomas's response to contemporary poetry intersects with his readings of older poetry. No critic or poet of the time was so deeply acquainted with the traditions of English-language poetry or so alert to new poetic movements in Ireland and America. Edward Thomas's writings on poetry have a double importance. Besides suggesting the hidden evolution of his own aesthetic, they constitute a lost history and critique of poetry before the Great War. They change our assumptions about that period. Thomas's perspectives on poets such as Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Lawrence, and Pound illuminate the making of modern poetry.
... a very able man in these matters ' ; Major Thomas Venner ; Michael Mallet ; Philip Carteret ; Francis Cradock , a merchant ( later an admirer of Milton's verse ) ; Sir Henry Ford ( later Irish Secretary ) ; Edward Bagshaw ; Thomas ...
John Clare's New Life
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table talk
Unpublished Letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the Rev. John Prior Estlin
I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality , I have renounced hazard however , but I am given to Harlots , and live in a state of Concubinage , I am at this moment under a course of restoration by Pearson's prescription , for a debility ...
142 . 4 Letters , II . 128 . 5 Letters , II . 204 . 6 White , The Unextinguished Hearth , pp . 145-6 . 7. White , The Unextinguished Hearth , p . 149 . 8 Clark , Prose , p . 267 . 9 Blake , The Everlasting Gospel . 10 P.W. , p . 156 .
Edward Thomas: Prose Writings : a Selected Edition
Avec Rupert Brooke, l’ange foudroyé, Christian Soleil fait revivre non seulement un des plus grands poètes de son époque mais aussi le monde disparu de l’Angleterre d’avant la Premiere Guerre mondiale.
Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith