Although Edward Thomas's critical reputation is based on his achievement as a poet, that achievement represents a brief flowering at the end of a career as a writer of prose. For more than twenty years Thomas wrote prose of all sorts: essays, reviews,...

The literary career of Edward Thomas was an unusual one in that he did not work in the genre for which he is now most noted--poetry--until he had put in eighteen years writing pastoral essays, criticism, biographies, travel books, collections of short...

The story of Edward Thomas, poet, is a singular one. At the age of thirty-six, having spent nearly twenty frustrating years turning out volumes of relatively undistinguished essays and journalism, Thomas wrote his first poem. Two years later, he was...

Edward Thomas worked for British intelligence in different capacities but with equal distinction throughout his life, during the Second World War as a naval intelligence officer and at Bletchley Park, afterwards at the Joint Intelligence Bureau, and latterly on the official history of British...

Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet. By B. Eugene McCarthy. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1997. 279 pp. [pound]34.50. Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet is the fifth book on Gray to come out...

Citing a century-old law passed to keep the state from spending too much on its first electric chair, a judge put two executions on hold Thursday as North Carolina struggles with the role doctors should play in carrying out the death penalty.The ruling by Superior...

Citing a century-old law passed to keep the state from spending too much on its first electric chair, a judge put two executions on hold Thursday as North Carolina struggles with the role doctors should play in carrying out the death penalty.The ruling by Superior...

In the following essay, Longley argues that Thomas's poetry destabilizes authority, perception, and time in a way that is foreign to modernist aesthetics. Relying on theories by Raymond Williams and Robyn Eckerley, the author provides close readings of three Thomas poems entitled “Home” to demonstrate that Thomas's poetry fuses ecological and environmental concerns with local or regional concerns.

In the following essay, Bromwich uses Edward Thomas's literary criticism of early modernists such as Ezra Pound and his rejection of the Symbolist movement, along with his friendship with Robert Frost, to explain how Thomas developed his own literary style, as evidenced in the poems “Tall Nettles,” “Liberty,” and “Blenheim Oranges.” The essay also contains an amusing anecdote about Thomas's misreading of Frost's poem, “The Road Not Taken...

In the following essay, Kirkham provides close readings of such poems as “Beauty,” “Melancholy,” “Ambition,” and “Wind and Mist,” among others, to explore how Thomas uses landscapes and nature to express depression and melancholic sentiment.