Philip Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 — 9 April 1917) was an Anglo-Welsh writer of prose and poetry. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Already an accomplished writer, Thomas only turned to poetry in 1914. He enlisted in the army in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
Thomas was born in Lambeth, London. He was educated at Battersea Grammar School, St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His family were mostly Welsh. Unusually, he married while still an undergraduate and determined to live his life by the pen. He then worked as a book reviewer, reviewing up to 15 books every week. He was already a seasoned writer by the outbreak of war, having published widely as a literary critic and biographer, as well as a writer on the countryside. He also wrote a novel The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913).
He became a close friend of Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies whose career he almost single-handedly developed. From 1905 Thomas lived, with his wife Helen and their family, at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks, Kent. Thomas rented a tiny nearby cottage for Davies and nurtured his writing as best he could. On one occasion Thomas even had to arrange for the manufacture, by a local wheelwright, of a makeshift wooden leg for Davies.
Even though Thomas thought that poetry was the highest form of literature and regularly reviewed it, he only became a poet at the end of 1914. Living at Steep, in East Hampshire, he initially published some poetry under the name Edward Eastaway.
By August 1914, the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire had become the residence of a number of literary figures including Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson and American poet Robert Frost. Edward Thomas was a visitor at this time.
The railway station at Adlestrop was immortalised by Thomas when his train made an unscheduled stop there shortly before the First World War.
Thomas enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting. He was promoted Corporal and in November 1916 was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was killed in action soon after he arrived in France at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. Although he survived the actual battle, he was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe.
Close friend W. H. Davies was devastated by the death and his commemorative poem "Killed In Action (Edward Thomas)" was included in Davies' 1918 collection "Raptures".
Thomas is buried in the Military Cemetery at Agny in France (Row C, Grave 43). He is also commemorated in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, London and by memorial windows in the churches at Steep, and Eastbury, Berkshire.
Thomas was survived by his wife, Helen, his son Merfyn and his two daughters Bronwen and Myfanwy.
As Philip Edward Thomas poet-soldier he is commemorated with Reginald Townsend Thomas actor-soldier died 1918 (who is buried at the spot) and other family members at the North East Surrey (Old Battersea) Cemetery.
After the war, Helen wrote about her courtship and early married life with Edward in the autobiography, As it Was (1926); later she added a second volume, World Without End (1931). Their daughter, Myfanwy, claims the books were written by her mother as a form of therapy to help lift her out of a deep depression to which she succumbed following the death of Edward. My Memory of W. H. Davies was published in 1973. Under Storm's Wing was published in 1997 and is a collection of writings including the two earlier autobiographies along with various other writings and letters.
Thomas's poems are noted for their attention to the English countryside and a certain colloquial style. A short poem of Thomas's serves as an example of how he blends war and countryside throughout his poetry:
In Memoriam
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
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 Great War poet Wilfred Owen, reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
In 1918, W. H. Davies published his poem Killed In Action (Edward Thomas) to mark the personal loss of his close friend and mentor.
Many poems about Edward Thomas by other poets can be found in the books Elected Friends: Poems For and About Edward Thomas, edited by Anne Harvey, and Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn.
In his 1980 autobiography, Ways of Escape, Graham Greene references Thomas's poem "The Other" (about a man who seems to be following his own double from hotel to hotel) in describing his own experience of being bedeviled by an imposter.
Edward Thomas's Collected Poems was one of Andrew Motion's ten picks for the poetry section of the "Guardian Essential Library" in October 2002.
In his 2002 novel Youth, J.M. Coetzee has his main character, intrigued by the survival of pre-modernist forms in British poetry, ask himself: "What happened to the ambitions of poets here in Britain? Have they not digested the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone for ever?" In contrast, Irish critic Edna Longley writes that Thomas's Lob, a 150-line poem, "strangely preempts The Waste Land through verses like: "This is tall Tom that bore / The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall / Once talked".
In his 1995 novel, Borrowed Time, the author Robert Goddard bases the home of the main character at Greenhayes in the village of Steep, where Thomas lived from 1913. Goddard weaves some of the feeling from Thomas's poems into the mood of the story and also uses some quotes from Thomas's works.
Will Self's 2006 novel, The Book of Dave, has a quote from The South Country as the book's epigraph:
I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers ... as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.
The children's author Linda Newbery has published a novel, "Lob" (David Fickling Books, 2010, illustrated by Pam Smy) inspired by the Edward Thomas poem of the same name and containing oblique references to other work by Thomas.
