Volume 33, Number 16 · October 23, 1986
An Art of Self-Discovery
By John Bayley
Collected Poems
by Edward Thomas
Oxford University Press, 198 pp., $10.95 (paper)
A Language not to be Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas
selected and with an introduction by Edna Longley
Carcanet, 290 pp., $9.50 (paper)
Edward Thomas: A Portrait
by R. George Thomas
Oxford University Press, 331 pp., $19.95
Edward Thomas belongs to an odd class of poet—the disappointed, dispossessed ones, who unexpectedly realize their hidden gifts as a result of some external pressure. If A.E. Housman had not fallen in love with a fellow undergraduate called Moses Jackson he would almost certainly never have written the poems that make up A Shropshire Lad; and had he not heard of Jackson's death many years later the further series called Last Poems would not have poured from his pen. Thomas's case is not so dramatic as that, but it is recognizably the same.
Review, 2172 words
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