The war and a sprained ankle

The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling.

From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family (he married when he was 21) by articles and reviews, a staggering number of these, and by prose books of various kinds, more than 40 of them; the thought of the work rate gives one a headache and certainly maddened him. Some were editions of poets, with long introductions, some historical, most were about the countryside, and belonged to what he contemptuously called ‘the Norfolk-jacket school of writing’. He did all this so well that he made a name for himself and also made himself so ill with the burden of literary commissions undertaken that he almost welcomed the outbreak of the first world war because the commissions dried up and nothing, not even a war, ‘could be worse’ than the treadmill he was on. Then, in December 1914, an exhausted 36-year-old, he began tentatively to turn his prose into verse.

His literary friends had been imploring him to do this for years. The American Robert Frost, then living in England, is often given the most credit, but he disclaimed it. ‘I referred him to paragraphs of his In Pursuit of Spring and told him to write it in verse form in exactly the same cadence. That’s all there was to it.’ (In Pursuit of Spring is brilliant, almost phantasmagoric, a man nearly at the end of his tether.) Gordon Bottomley told him to try verse. So did W. H. Hudson, who said that ‘Thomas replied, “It is strange you should say this.