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1917 Poems by Edward Thomas (Edward Eastway) Selwyn & Blount : Poetry

1917 Poems by Edward Thomas (Edward Eastway) Selwyn & Blount : Poetry

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Poems by Edward Thomas (Edward Eastway)

London; Selwyn & Blount, 1917. First reprint. Hardback, plain cloth with peper title label. 63 pages plus 2 pages of publisher's adverts. Witha portrait froma photograph by Dunca Williams.

CONDITION
A good copy. The cloth binding is very good. Endpapers good. Very small name and date written to front endpaper. All contents present and pages clean throughout.

Philip Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917) was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

Even though Thomas thought that poetry was the highest form of literature and regularly reviewed it, he only became a poet himself at the end of 1914 when living at Steep, and initially published his poetry under the name Edward Eastaway. The American poet Robert Frost, who was living in England at the time, in particular encouraged Thomas (then more famous as a critic) to write poetry, and their friendship was so close that the two planned to reside side by side in the United States. Frost's most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken", was inspired by walks with Thomas and Thomas's indecisiveness about which route to take.

Thomas's poems are written in a colloquial style and frequently feature the English countryside. The short poem In Memoriam exemplifies how his poetry blends the themes of war and the countryside. On 11 November 1985, Thomas was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription, written by fellow poet Wilfred Owen, reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Thomas was described by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes as "the father of us all." Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has said that Thomas occupies "a crucial place in the development of twentieth-century poetry" for introducing a modern sensibility, later found in the work of such poets as W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes, to the poetic subjects of Victorian and Georgian poetry.

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