Contains poems, without any commentary, enabling them to be used either as student reference material or as 'clean' copies for the examination.

Winner of the Costa Biography Award, a fascinating exploration of one of the 20th century's most influential poets.

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers—Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist—formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War. The story of Edward Thomas' turn to poetry, in fact, has been dominated by the account of Robert Frost's injunction: to break his existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody. Thomas himself had already championed Frost's own early work: These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric.... Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of the secondary poets. The metre avoids not only old fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact the medium is common speech.... Mr. Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry once again. This book presents for the first time the full record, arranged chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one another—their letters, poems, and Thomas' review of Frost's first two books. They reveal a warmth and charm that give us the key to the relationship between Frost and Thomas.

Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be seen as one of the great English poets of the 20th century. Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon as a "war poet," he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war. His main subjects were the English countryside and people, solitude, and the anguish of solipsism. As de la Mare wrote eighty years ago, "When Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no other where than in these poems." This complete collection of Thomas's poems returns us to the ongoing relevance of this essential poet. Revealing a poet whose work resonates in our times, this volume will be returned to again and again. The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow And true love parting blackens a bright morrow: Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen. But greater sorrow from less love has been That can mistake lack of despair for hope And knows not tempest and the perfect scope Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual Of drops that from remorse and pity fall And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw, Removed eternally from the sun's law. - Last Poem [The sorrow of true love]

Spring was late in 1913 and Edward Thomas decided to go and search for winter's grave and the tell-tale signs of season's turn - he set out to cycle westwards from London to the Quantocks. Edward Thomas 1878-1917 turned from writing prose to poetry in 1914. His work as a poet has been widely celebrated and admired - Ted Hughes described Thomas as "the father of us all". The Pursuit of Spring, originally published in 1914, bridges the divide between Thomas the journalist/critic and Thomas the highly regarded poet.

This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues. Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry.

Poetry. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Tom Sleigh. In his new book, Jeffrey Harrison reflects on the daily familiarities and fragilities experienced in a long marriage and as a parent of teenagers, refracted through the shock of a brother's suicide. Limpid and direct on the surface but eloquent in resonance, INTO DAYLIGHT asks what comes after: How to live, how to continue writing, and how to find one's proper relationship with the world and restore some semblance of delight, while giving voice to sadness and pain.