Last Poems E-Book

Edward Thomas

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "Last Poems," Edward Thomas distills his existential contemplations through poignant imagery and lyrical expression, capturing the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. Known for his mastery of nature poetry, Thomas intertwines his reflections on the Great War with a deep appreciation for the English landscape, creating a collection that is rich in emotional resonance and philosophical depth. The poems, often characterized by their simplicity and sense of longing, are set against the backdrop of early 20th-century British literary movements which grappled with themes of loss and identity in a rapidly changing world. Edward Thomas, a poet and essayist, was heavily influenced by his experiences in the countryside and the traumas of World War I, which are palpably woven into "Last Poems." His early life as a nature writer and his friendships with contemporaries such as Robert Frost shaped a unique perspective that permeates this collection. Thomas's personal struggles and his ultimate sacrifice in the war imbue the verses with authenticity and urgency, making this work an intimate glimpse into the mind of a troubled yet brilliant poet. I wholeheartedly recommend "Last Poems" to readers seeking a profound exploration of mortality and the beauty of the natural world. Thomas's ability to evoke deep emotions with spare language invites readers to ponder the transient beauty of existence, making it a seminal work for both poetry enthusiasts and those interested in the interplay between art and human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

Leseprobe

Edward Thomas

Last Poems

Enriched edition. Reflections on nature, war, and life during World War I

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Theo Remborough

Edited and published by Good Press, 2019

[email protected]

EAN 4057664583819

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

Last Poems

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This collection gathers late work by Edward Thomas and presents it as a coherent, self-contained portrait of his mature poetic voice. Rather than a complete works or a miscellaneous sampler, it offers a distilled view of his final phase, when his craft and outlook had reached a spare, concentrated clarity. The title signals a focus on endings and reckonings—art brought to a point of culmination. By bringing these pieces together under one cover, the volume invites readers to encounter Thomas not as a scattered presence across anthologies, but as a single, continuous mind attending closely to place, mood, and moment.

The contents are poems—compact, lyric, and meditative—composed in unrhymed and subtly patterned verse, with occasional use of delicate rhyme and cadence. There are no novels, plays, essays, or letters here; this is a volume of poetry only. The selection includes the poems I Never Saw That Land Before, To-night, and Snow, each representing Thomas’s characteristic modes of observation and reflection. Some pieces are brief and epigrammatic, others more spacious in their unfolding, but all remain rooted in the lyric’s intimacy of voice. Readers should expect poised, attentive speech rather than narrative elaboration or overt rhetorical display.

Across the poems, certain preoccupations recur and interweave. Thomas returns to the English landscape—lanes, fields, hedgerows, weather—and to the ways these outward particulars mirror states of feeling and thought. The poetry draws strength from unspectacular scenes, finding in them questions of belonging and distance, memory and return, transience and endurance. Time’s passage is felt in seasonal shifts and in the moments just before change arrives. A sense of journeying hovers: paths that beckon, homes that anchor, and horizons that open. Without declaring theses, the poems let perception ripen into insight, allowing readers to discover meaning in the act of looking long.

Stylistically, Thomas is notable for plain diction, exact phrasing, and a cadence that seems conversational while quietly metrical. His lines move with unforced music, often pivoting on a single image or turn of thought. Restraint is central: emotional intensity is carried by understatement, by the careful placing of a word or the pause at a line’s end. Description serves attention rather than ornament, and images rarely strain for effect. He favors clarity over flourish, yet the clarity is layered; ordinary details draw depth from suggestion. The result is a tone that is lucid, poised, and often haunted by a calm unease.

Taken together, these poems retain their significance for the way they renew pastoral attention without nostalgia and engage modern uncertainties without theatrical despair. They stand at a junction where tradition’s steady craft meets a more inward, exploratory sensibility. The work’s lasting appeal lies in its fidelity to the seen world and its refusal to simplify the inner one. Readers discover a poetry that is approachable in surface texture yet complex in implication. As a whole, the collection offers continuity rather than miscellany, showing how a single sensibility can find inexhaustible variety in the near-at-hand and the everyday.

The presence of I Never Saw That Land Before, To-night, and Snow offers clear points of entry for new readers. Each centers on a quietly charged situation: a landscape perceived as if newly found, an evening distilled to its attentive stillness, and a snowfall that both covers and reveals. The poems do not depend on plot; their drama is in noticing, in the pressure of silence around an image, in the way weather or light bears meaning without proclamation. Attending to these pieces suggests how the rest of the selection works: through exactness, patience, and a gently unfolding sense of recognition.

The sequence encourages unhurried reading. While individual poems are self-sufficient, their echoes accumulate—motifs of road and threshold, field and wood, dusk and dawn—so that the book yields more than the sum of its parts. It is curated to foreground Thomas’s late style in its most concentrated form, allowing readers to feel the steadiness of his voice across different settings and moods. As an introduction to his poetry, it shows why these works endure: not for grand narratives, but for truthful attention. The collection invites return, the kind of rereading in which familiarity deepens rather than diminishes surprise.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Edward Thomas (3 March 1878–9 April 1917) wrote the poems later gathered in Last Poems during the final years of his life, chiefly between late 1914 and early 1917, when Britain moved from an uneasy peace to the full mobilization of the First World War. Though often focused on the English countryside, these lyrics are permeated by the pressures of a nation at war and a culture in transition. Composed in places such as Steep, Hampshire, and during military service, they were issued posthumously in 1918. Their seasonal atmospheres and meditations on seeing, night, and weather anchor the collection’s unity across individual titles.

Thomas’s career unfolded within the Edwardian and early Georgian literary milieu. The Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh (1912, 1915, 1917) promoted plain diction, rural themes, and a reflective intimacy that suited his emerging voice. Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury (opened 1913) created a sociable center for readings and exchange. The Dymock circle in Gloucestershire (1914–1915)—including Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Gibson—furthered a conversational, landscape-rooted poetics. Thomas’s close friendship with Frost, forged after he reviewed North of Boston in 1914, helped him turn from criticism to verse, refining a cadence that balanced speech-rhythm with traditional measure.

Before the war Thomas was a prolific prose writer and topographer, producing The South Country (1909), The Icknield Way (1913), and In Pursuit of Spring (1914). These books mapped paths, hedgerows, lanes, and commons from the Chilterns to the Somerset levels, embedding a minute geography of England in his imagination. The practice of walking—guided by Ordnance Survey maps and an antiquarian interest in ancient trackways—shaped his poetic attention to weather, light, and transient perceptions. The rise of preservationist sentiment (the National Trust, founded 1895) and debates about rights of way provided a cultural framework for valuing local landscapes threatened by modern pressures.

Social and technological change framed the pastoral quiet of Thomas’s settings. By the 1911 Census, England and Wales were overwhelmingly urban, and motorcars, railways, telegraph lines, and new utilities pressed into rural districts. Agricultural depopulation and the memory of late nineteenth‑century depression complicated nostalgia for “old” countryside life. At the same time, national strains—suffrage militancy, the Irish Home Rule crisis (1912–1914), and labor unrest—colored pre‑war atmospheres. The poems’ careful noticing of lanes at dusk or fields under snow registers a fraught equilibrium: a modern nation glancing back at older continuities even as it speeds toward rupture, a tension audible across Thomas’s late work.