Author Description

In this first full-length biography of Edward Thomas for three decades, Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a leading authority on the poets of the First World War, brings new life to the story of the man now acknowledge to be one of the major literary figures of the period, the poet and prose writer whom Walter de la Mare called 'a mirror of England'. Extensively illustrated throughout with a wealth of new material and told with clarity, panache and wit, Thomas's life makes for absorbing reading: his early forced marriage, his dependence on opium, his friendships with leading figures such as Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupurt Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Hilaire Belloc, Eleanor Farjeon and Robert Frost and the events leading up to his death in France in 1917. Moorcroft Wilson dispels the myth-making surrounding Thomas in order to reveal his true worth as a writer and as a war poet equal in talent to such great contemporaries as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. With startling new information on the true details of Thomas's death at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917, his attitude to the army and his relationship with his loving wife, Helen, as well as a reconsideration of the fashioning of Thomas as depressive and melancholic, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras discovers the man whose contribution to English poetry cannot be overstated, whose work can now be seen to be 'situated on the cusp of history and on the brink of modern selfhood'. In this remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the poet, Moorcroft Wilson shows that Thomas's work could not be more important to the literary world of today; this is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. -- from dust jacket.