Edward Thomas – war or nature poet?

War poet is an unsatisfactory description of Edward Thomas. What is a war poet? Are you a war poet if you write poetry about war? Are you a war poet if you write poetry during a war? Are you simply a war poet if you are a soldier and write poetry? It would seem the noted soldiering and scribbling of Edward Thomas consigned him to this absurd category which we still otiosely use for our own convenience. In fact, relatively little of Thomas’ brief poetic output is concerned with war. Most of his poems are tender speculative expressions about the natural world and its strong and subtle connection to the human mind.

Thomas was born in London and attended St Paul’s School and Oxford University. He met and married his wife while at Oxford and after graduating he made his money as a literary critic, travel writer and biographer. He often rambled across the countryside for days at a time and wrote what his wife called “nature diaries”. These diaries are not only beguiling accounts of rural experiences, they are also beautiful descriptions of the cycle of seasons and its effect on England’s wildlife. They can be read as prose rehearsals for the poetry he would later write.

Although he is ranked as one of the best poets of the last century, he didn’t start composing until he was 36, by which time, after years of reading, reviewing and reflecting on poetry’s aesthetic powers, his mind was perfectly prepared for an efficient production of unique and sumptuous verse. Having mastered the myriad of forms which were common in the Victorian and early modern period, he wrote in structures which a desultory glance might see as strict and formal. But, instead of following customary directives on metre and stress to a proverbial T, he loosened the tight terms of traditional verse and gave himself two or three feet either way so as to prioritise a consistency of sentiment over satisfying an expectation of rhythm.

He is, in my modest opinion, one of the greatest literary voices this country can boast. His exactness and elusiveness tantalises and intrigues. His simple phrases and observations might fool the reader into a limiting impression of an eloquent lover of verdant summers and fragrant springs, but he was much more than that. I believe it was Owen Barfield who wrote about the importance of mystery with regards to great poetry and it was Ezra Pound who adroitly declared “there can be no literature without curiosity.” The restraint of Edward Thomas creates a mystery which occasions our curiosity. His esoteric understanding of which songs belong to which birds, of which weeds harass which herbs, establishes a teacher-student dynamic between author and reader. His familiarity with the natural world and his professionalism when it came to reading and writing meant he carefully selected the emphasis of his depictions and the style of his descriptions so as to pay deserving homage to his subjects.

However, perhaps the designation of ‘nature poet’ is as inaccurate as his classroom categorisation of war poet. When the poet Vernon Watkins was interviewed about Thomas he said that Thomas was not a nature poet, at least not in the Wordsworthian sense of a spiritual communion with an organic environment. This, in Watkin’s view, is because the deeper Wordsworth felt about his environment, the happier he would become.  With Thomas there is a reticence, an unsettledness. He adumbrates his attitude, suggests rather than states, and often seems able to say more than he wishes to. This distinction is rather arbitrary in some ways – not all nature poets must be gladdened by nature, but there is something to be said for Thomas not being the sort of nature poet who becomes enthusiastically lachrymose over a laburnum shedding its leaves. You unearth more emotions than mere joy when contemplating the full span of nature, its compassions and cruelties, its destitutions and abundances, its potency and impotence. Like the ancient Chinese poet Wang Wei, Thomas uses his extensive knowledge of flora and fauna to frame a feeling. He is, as Watkins said “a poet of mood.”

Thomas’s evasive feelings and elegant vagueness has allowed school and college curriculums to stuff his work into poorly fitting genres, themes and phases. I am more comfortable calling Thomas a nature poet than a war poet because without his fixation with the natural world he wouldn’t have had his bucolic and distinctive vocabulary. Though its dramatic events spurred on his writing and he wrote several marvellous poems about it, without the war, we may have had twenty, thirty or even forty extra years of Edward Thomas’ unassuming genius and exceptional verse.