Edward Thomas: the Origins of his Poetrytakes the reader into dark, unknown areas of poetic composition in order to excavate a tunnel to a more illumined place. The focus is on the poems and prose of Edward Thomas, a fearless, challenging, typically elusive writer on the composing process. To assist on this journey, reference is made to a range of his writings. These offer a wealth of information on the subject from varying angles: notes prior to writing poems, letters, reviews, prose essays and books, drafts and completed poems. Study of this material offers a rounded picture of Thomas’s...

Much of Thomas’s life was spent not writing poetry. From 1897 to 1913, he produced extensive criticism on poetry and poetic prose but practically no poems. His mature poems surfaced only in his last two years. Poised, for several years, at the brink of poetic composition, his writing career is like an analogy, writ large, of the process of composing a poem. Andrew Motion notes of the development of Thomas’s prose writing style: ‘With hindsight it is obvious that he was clearing the ground for his poems.’²

As a result, an obvious place to start observing Thomas’s poetic process is...

In Thomas’s writings he alluded to a language of the physical environment, an anonymous language residing in features of the land or in the birdsong that emanates from it. He repeatedly examined the distance between this language and contemporary human forms of articulation like human song, speech or poetry. However, he also used oral tradition to link the language inscribed in or expressed by the physical environment to the written text of poetry. Such language of oral tradition is a near cousin to the language of the land, sharing its quality of anonymity, distanced from it only relatively recently, and...

In order to ensure that the printed poem retains some of the qualities of oral literature and of language held within the land, ‘written’ on it by man or geological forces in form of roads, furrows, hill, Thomas sustained emphasis on process both in the act of composition and the completed work. To achieve this, he employed certain techniques. These can be grouped under the broad headings of ‘absence’, ‘dislocation’ and ‘divagations’. Examination of these techniques forms the basis of the ensuing chapters.

In Thomas’s critical writing, absence features highly as a criterion of praise. The poetry of Frost, the...

Just as the division between ellipses and aporia is not always clear, so it might initially appear that ellipses, aporia and aposiopesis all come under the generic term ‘gap’ since each of them is marked by forms of absence. However, the term ‘gap’ in this book is not simply an equation for absence. It specifically denotes shifts in emphasis from what is missing to what is present. This is in accordance with dictionary and etymological definitions, which clearly distinguish the gap from other forms of absence. It is an ‘open mouth, also opening, chasm’, ‘an unfilled space or interval; a...

The term ‘unfinishedness’ refers to the particular if invisible shape of a work that extends beyond its visible written parts. Thomas’s subscription to unfinishedness in poetry is clear in a letter to his friend Jesse Berridge:

Send the verses back when you have done with them. I fancy they are sufficiently new in their way to be unacceptable if the reader gets caught up by their way & doesn’t get any effect before he begins to consider & see their ‘unfinish’.³

Thomas was influenced by the Romantic poets’ appreciation of unfinishedness, evident in their interest in ruins, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s fascination with...

Thomas addressed the subject of poetic composition tangentially. Asides relating to it abound in his travel and country books, critical biographies, reviews of poetry and many epistolary discussions with contemporary poet friends. References also exist, implicitly, in the shifts in content and style between his drafts and completed poetic works. He wrote more directly about it inFeminine Influencebut this whole book was composed tangentially, without a considered structure: ‘I put down all but everything just as it occurred in the few months I was doing it.’² Dislocation therefore lies at the heart of his composing processes.

Critics have...

Dislocation of thought can interrupt, interfere or pause sequential thought processes by distracting attention or offering tangential non-logical sequences of thought. It is a distinguishing feature of Thomas’s style, which builds on Wordsworth’s practice of composing while walking and Keats’s open flexible state of negative capability, ‘taking hints from every noble insect that pays us a visit’.² As Newlyn notes, Thomas ‘understood how a relaxed walking pace can stimulate the thinking process’ and ‘saw analogies between the movement of roads and the way thoughts branch sideways, or pause to take in random and fleeting associations, without losing their sense of...

The frequent incidence of dislocation in Thomas’s poems is accompanied by a focus on physical sensations and movements in the present moment, and also on the movements of thought, of expatiation. He called these movements ‘divagations’, and made use of them to achieve a sense of resolution in his work.

One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein²

Tracking divagations in thought requires sustained and flexible attention – what Andrew Motion calls ‘open-minded wariness’.³ ‘Insomnia’ provides a useful exploration of the issues involved, showing how lack or excess of attention halts the...