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.
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.
