the letters at least demonstrate the patient care, the intensive scholarship, and the fastidious honesty with which he prepared himself for each successive publisher's assignment." The fact is that in spite of its unevenness, Thomas's prose, especially as it develops in his essays, forms a body of work that prepared him to write, in the last two-and-one-half years of his life, several of the finest poems of his generation.
Philip Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth on 3 March 1878. His parents were both Welsh, his father, Philip Henry Thomas, hailing from Tredegar and his mother, Elizabeth Townsend Thomas, from Newport; they had been married in Wales and moved to London when Philip Henry Thomas went to work as a staff clerk for railways at the Board of Trade. Edward Thomas grew up in Battersea and from an early age spent many hours bird nesting and exploring on Wandsworth Common, fishing in local rivers and on farm ponds, and taking long walks in the country. He soon found confirmation of his interest in nature in the writings of Richard Jefferies, whose works he devoured along with those of other naturalists and travel writers and the standard English poets.
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