Celebrated 'English' poet Edward Thomas was one of Wales' finest writers
This article by Andrew Webb, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, was originally published on . Read the .
Shortly after 7am on April 9 1917, 39-year-old writer Edward Thomas was killed by a shell in northern France. He left a body of mostly unpublished work that has since cemented his place as one of .
Edward Thomas used English to write about the spirit of Wales.: Arthur St John Adcock/WikimediaAll of were written in the two and a half years leading up to his death. Almost immediately on its posthumous publication, his poetry came to speak for a rural England whose surviving people and culture had been decimated by four years of war. In a foreword , Walter de la Mare described Thomas鈥檚 poetry as 鈥渁 mirror of England鈥�, suggesting that it offered readers a portrayal of a rural nation that had been 鈥渟hattered鈥� by the catastrophic experience of World War I.
Thomas has become one of the most widely read English language poets of the 20th century. His Collected Poems has gone through numerous editions, and poems such as 鈥溾�� and 鈥溾�� have been widely anthologised.
Thomas has a deserved reputation as a poet with an unparalleled eye for the details of the natural world, managing through these observations to make some profound reflections on the human and of war. His influence on subsequent generations of English poets is hard to overstate: former poet laureate Ted Hughes famously called Thomas 鈥溾��.
There has been plenty of discussion of Thomas鈥檚 work over the past few decades and yet there is one major aspect that has remained largely unexamined: his association with Wales.
An English poet?
Calling Thomas an English poet belies his own complex national identity. Born in London to Welsh parents in 1878, Thomas made frequent trips back to Swansea and the Carmarthenshire areas of south Wales to stay with relatives. He had strong friendships with Welsh-language poets and , and later attended Lincoln College, Oxford from 1897 to 1900, where he was tutored by , one of the most significant figures in nonconformist Welsh culture.
Edwards awakened Thomas鈥檚 sense of Welsh national identity 鈥� after graduating he asked his former tutor 鈥渢o suggest any kind of work 鈥� to help you and the Welsh cause鈥�. Three years earlier, Edwards had called for 鈥渁 literature that will be 鈥�, and it seems that Thomas took up his challenge, 鈥渋n English I might do something by writing of Wales鈥�.
Welsh in spirit
Edward Thomas on 1905: WikipediaThe visits to Gwili and Watcyn Wyn became more frequent and both poets feature in Thomas鈥檚 1905 travel book . A description of Gwili fishing in a Carmarthenshire stream also features in one of three books of Wales-oriented sketches and short stories published by Thomas between 1902 and 1911: , , and . These books are full of Welsh subject matter, including sketches, as well as adaptations of, and allusions to, Welsh folk material and literature.
In his review work for newspapers, Thomas lamented the lack of a widely circulated collection of Welsh folk tales, something that he himself put right in 1911 when he published , an anthology of Welsh and Irish folk stories written 鈥渨hen Wales and Ireland were entirely independent of England鈥�.
While Thomas鈥檚 reputation as a quintessentially English writer rests largely on his poetry, it is now clear that even this is not as English as we previously thought. Welsh subject matter clearly creeps into . The following verse from Words is a riddle-like reference to the tradition of Welsh bardic poetry:
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings鈥�
The lines below from allude to Sarn Helen, the mythical Roman road linking fortresses in the north and south of Wales:
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods
Recently, however, that Thomas鈥檚 knowledge of influenced his work too. Thomas鈥檚 poetry has long been regarded as innovative, but critics have tended to look for its origins in , the , or in the spoken voice.
What we have missed is the formal crossover between Welsh-language literary forms and Thomas鈥檚 use of intricate sound patterns. The opening lines of 鈥溾��, for example, repeat the consonant sounds of 鈥渓鈥�, 鈥渟鈥� and 鈥渕鈥� across the first line, and again in the second line. There is also the internal rhyme in 鈥渟un鈥�, 鈥渟um鈥� and 鈥渉um鈥�:
The downs will lose the sun, white alyssum
Lose the bees鈥� hum
This is a clear example of cynghanedd, the intricate system of which is unique to Welsh-language poems.
Thomas certainly was one of the greatest English-language poets but, one hundred years on, it is becoming clear that he belongs just as much to an Anglophone Welsh literary tradition as he does to the literature of England.
Publication date: 7 April 2017