(Philip) Edward Thomas Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on (Philip) Edward Thomas

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 killed in the trenches in France, leaving behind fewer than 150 poems, only 8 of which had found their way into print. It took another fifteen years for Thomas to be recognized for what he was. In 1932, the influential critic F. R. Leavis, in a book defending Pound and Eliot, rescued Thomas from the graveyard of Georgian poetry to which he had commonly been assigned and insisted that Thomas's poetry, despite its apparently conventional surface, expressed a "representative modern sensibility." Since then, Leavis's judgment has been increasingly vindicated, and Thomas's slender body of poetry--informed by a vision of doubt, alienation, and human limitation--has come to be seen as occupying an important position in twentieth-century British poetry.

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