Product Description

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58108 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 335 pages

Review
Edna Longley's definitive new edition of Edward Thomas's Collected Poems makes a case for the enduring, essential relevance to the 21st century of this English poet who died in World War I. The book is a crowning achievement by Thomas's best advocate, approachable by the beginner and invaluable to the specialist, with a critical apparatus which is at once a biography tracing the growth of the poet's mind and an engrossing anthology of his vivid, melancholy prose. --Seamus Heaney, Sunday Business Post (Dublin)

About the Author
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen's University Belfast. Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas's prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988) from Faber, and Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000) from Bloodaxe. She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000).

Customer Reviews

A major modern poet
Edna Longley's new edition of Edward Thomas's poetry is a joy - generous in every way, in size, elegant Paul Nash cover(they were wartime friends) and above all is the full and convincing commentary on poems, especially those which show Thomas's dialectical working-out of dilemmas and decisions. Her exploration of the background to the poems in prose writing, letters and notebooks creates an intriguing picture of this complex, gifted writer whose life was so sadly cut short just two years after he began writing poetry.