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.

In the following essay, the author examines Thomas's relationship to the Georgian poets, considering Thomas's depiction of nostalgia, pastoralism, and class relations in such poems as “The Gypsy,” “Old Man,” and “Lob.”

In the following essay, first delivered as a lecture in July 1954, Day Lewis, once the Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1968 to 1972, states that as young man, he and the poet W. H. Auden considered Thomas a poet “whom we had little or no hope of ever equaling.” What separates Thomas from his contemporaries, the author argues, are Thomas's keen powers of observation, familiar knowledge of nature, and colloquial, authoritative manner imbued with sincerity and honesty.

In the following essay, Wilmer, a poet himself, reads several poems by Thomas to argue that poems such as “Old Man,” “Lob,” and “Fifty Faggots” wrestle with Thomas's complex and sometimes contradictory understanding of Englishness, patriotism, and nostalgia.

In the following essay, the author disagrees with Antony Easthope's dismissal of Thomas's poem “Adelstrop” as metrically regular and “comfortable” in an unchallenging way. The author discusses the structural complexities of “Adelstrop” structural complexities in comparison with Seamus Heaney's “The Graubelle Man,” and argues for a more nuanced understanding of modernist poetry.

In the following essay, Draper considers Thomas as a writer of “lyric tragedy,” comparing him to Keats and Hardy, with special attention to Thomas's treatment of nature, war, and mortality.

In the following book review of Eleanor Farjeon's biography of Thomas, the author explores Thomas's “unconventional patriotism” in poems such as “Old Man,” “The Glory,” and “Home.”

In the following essay, the author argues that Thomas's writings during and about the war evince “a profound uncertainty” regarding what it meant to be “English” and what it meant to have any kind of identity during the 1910s. Through providing close readings of poems such as “This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong,” “I Never Saw That Land Before,” and others, the author suggests that Thomas's uncertainty is elaborated in his poetry by ...

In the following essay, written just three years after Thomas's death, the author focuses on the intimacy and sincerity of Thomas's poems, which, the author argues, reflect a “desire to comprehend the world's beauty” along with a “resolve to know the fullness of its reality.”

In the following essay, the author examines critical writings and poetry by Thomas to suggest that poems like Thomas's “The Other” and “Like the Touch of Rain” were influenced by the mysticism of the seventeenth-century figure, Thomas Trahane. The author argues that Thomas was struck by Traherne's “ecstasy at the sight of common things” and Traherne's notion that each individual consciousness contains all the others.

In the following essay, the author, a British literary critic and editor of Rhyme magazine, concludes that Thomas is “not a great poet,” but nevertheless praises the search for truth in Thomas's poetry, comparing him favorably to Keats.

In the following essay, Ashton examines the poetic qualities in Thomas's prose and traces his development as a poet.