Reviews of and Now All Roads Lead to France

This is 1 of those books that I would happily have ignored as 'not for me' (indeed, I happily had) but for a friend urging me to read it in the strongest terms ("one of the best books I've read all year"). Does information technology thing, I tentatively wondered, that I barely know of Edward Thomas at all, and certainly oasis't read his poesy? "Absolutely not."

Now All Roads Atomic number 82 to France may be burdened by a impuissant (albeit relevant) title, but the subtitle is unarguable. It relates, flavor by season, the final four years of Edward Thomas's life, earlier he died on the Arras battlefield on nine April 1917. The previous day, a dud shell had delivered him a lucky escape. Then, after a successful Centrolineal assault, Thomas leaned into a dug-out to fill his pipe when "a vanquish passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his middle. He fell without a mark on his body."

Matthew Hollis follows the onetime principle that you should begin a story every bit close to the end as possible, and his volume is all the better for it. In a life of 30-nine years, where Thomas didn't even begin writing poetry until a little over two years before his death, the risk of boring the reader with childhood and early on life would be groovy. Instead Hollis fills u.s.a. in briefly with what nosotros need to know, and concentrates in detail on Thomas and his environment and influences.

In fact, this is not just a book about Edward Thomas, but virtually the cultural life of England in the early on twentieth century, and the opposing forces who wanted to motion poesy on from its Edwardian stagnation. In one corner were the 'Georgian poets', so called for their inclusion in anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published by Harold Monro'due south Poetry Bookshop betwixt 1912 and 1922. They included, behind the survivors like Rupert Brooke and John Masefield, thickets of poets each of whom regarded himself as the greatest poet in England, all now more or less forgotten: W.Westward. Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, Due west.H. Davies. The Georgians were, said Monro, a 'forward movement' in poetry, and he probably didn't intend faint praise when he described their verse equally something "the full general public could appreciate without straining its intelligence." To others, the Georgians, with their innocent, pastoral poems in sing-song rhythms, were below regard. As T.Due south. Eliot put it, not intending any kind of praise, "the Georgians caress everything they impact." Squared up opposite were the Imagists, including Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Richard Aldington, but virtually prominently Ezra Pound, and whose manifesto required direct treatment, pared language and a relatively complimentary poesy. They were, as Hollis says, "modernistic, forward-facing, trim," and exemplified in Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro'.

I didn't know Edward Thomas'due south poesy at all when I started this book, though I enjoyed the first few sections so much that I quickly went out and bought his Nerveless Poems. The outset glance of them seems to park him with the Georgians: the bucolic concerns, the looking downwardly and looking in, the frequent recourse to rhyme. In fact what Hollis assuredly shows us in the kickoff half of the volume – earlier Thomas had written a unmarried verse form – is that he was persuaded of the need for a new cadence or tone in poesy for years before he began writing information technology. This confidence was shared past the man who more than whatever other shaped Thomas'south approach to poetry and who is hither and so thoroughly presented that he becomes the second subject area of the book: Robert Frost.

The names are coming thick at present: Frost, Pound, Eliot, Brooke, Yeats likewise. Hollis's biography quickens an entire lost world, and is a rounded recreation of the sort of literary life which has ever seemed just out of arm's – or time'southward – reach. It seemed out of reach to Thomas too, who by 1913, at the age of 35, was a busy critic, editor and biographer. He had published more than than 20 prose books and more than i,500 signed book reviews (with plenty more printed sans byline). Simply his prolific charge per unit did not hateful low standards: he was "the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Verse," according to a alphabetic character in The Times, and Walter de la Mare praised his unswerving delivery to distinguishing rich crop from fallow field:

For the true cause, he believed, is better served by an uncompromising 'Trespassers will exist prosecuted' than by an amiable 'All are welcome'.

(De La Mare too said, perceptively and presciently, that "any reviewer who uses the discussion 'genius' should be fined for the benefit of a literary fund.") Thomas, busying himself with scrappy literary piece of work, had suffered from depression since earlier going to university, and found no happiness in family unit life. In reading of his scenic condone for the needs of his wife and children, I was reminded of John Cheever, who "loved beingness a father in the abstract, just the everyday facts of the affair were oft a letdown." Thomas spent as much time equally possible away from his family, and made them miserable when he did render for brief visits. When his wife Helen was pregnant with their second kid, she wrote to a friend, "I have prayed that I and my infant may dice, merely we shall not, tho this would free Edward." Thomas himself acknowledged that "What I really ought to practice is live lone" (which he more or less did, given his frequent weeks-, even months-long absences) but was non higher up absurdly passing the blame, or at least failing to take it upon himself. "Merely I can't discover the courage to practice the many things necessary for taking that step. It is actually the kind [Helen] and the children who make life nigh impossible." Since Thomas had no considerate person in his life to tell him to shit or become off the pot, he connected this selfish behaviour until his death. Was the unhappiness he brought his wife and children worth it for the poems it gave united states?

It is non, of form, a biographer'due south chore to pass judgment on his subject, but at times Hollis seems almost to be writing a narrative account from Thomas's own viewpoint, with all the identification that implies. There is but a little of the spousal relationship issues from the standpoint of Helen, the married woman who put the long into long-suffering. He implicitly criticises a poetry editor, who knew Thomas well, for returning poems to him unread (even though Thomas had submitted them as the piece of work of some other, anonymous, poet, so the editor couldn't know they were Thomas'southward ain). And he offers no comment on Thomas'due south embarrassing renunciation of his early on – farsighted – praise of Ezra Pound, apparently to relieve his critical career in the face of outrage from London'southward literary cliques. However, these are the only weak points I could detect in an otherwise exemplary (half-) Life. If pushed, I could besides complain about the choice of tired photos – so ubiquitous they're invisible – of several of the main players: I only have to say the names Due west.B. Yeats, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke and I guarantee yous will know exactly which photos are used to depict them in the short eight pages of illustrations. However I presume these – school of Google Image search, page i – were not Hollis's choices.

Ah yes: back to Robert Frost. He dominates much of the book, and his poems are written well-nigh here with such sympathy and understanding that I immediately wanted to read them instead of Thomas'south. He was Thomas's greatest friend and mentor, and the two independently came up, and so supported one another in, the notion of "the audio of sense": a new acknowledgement of poesy as carrying the rhythms and tones of natural speech communication. This was, to use a terrible phrase, a third style which challenged both Georgian decoration and Imagist minimalism. It came from a belief that "words be in the mouth, not in books." Simultaneously acknowledging and challenging his antecedents, Frost declared that his own verse "dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above." For Thomas's part, he eschewed the forcing of rhyme where none naturally existed, warning himself against "whatsoever hereafter lenience to the mob of gentlemen who rhyme with ease." Hollis'south careful unpicking and associates of Thomas's and Frost'due south theories of 'the sound of sense' is thrilling and brilliant; we see Thomas gradually and then suddenly get a poet, erupting with a white heat of inventiveness in belatedly 1914. ("Did anyone always begin at 36 in the shade?" he wondered.) For him this was a natural development, fuelled by Frost'south empathy, of his thinking since the turn of the century: "the all-time lyrics seem to be the poet's natural speech," he wrote in 1901, or as Hollis more formally puts it, this was "the overlaying of variable spoken communication rhythms upon the strictures of conventional blank poesy."

She found the celandines of February
Always before u.s. all. Her nature and proper noun
Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply equally when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.

It seems probable that this book will exist read predominantly by those who already know Thomas'southward verse. For me, the result is an enlightening and particularly tense read: wondering whether he will actually get effectually to writing all that verse as the finish grows nearer and he heads off to war – or, more seriously, feeling the anticipatory buzz as I awaited the unveiling of the work. (Offset in his mid-30s and knowing so much about poesy before he began means that Thomas has almost no apprenticeship material: his gift springs from the womb fully formed.)

The corollary of that is that once Thomas gets going, and once he goes off to war and his death comes closer, the book seemed less urgent to me. His desire to go to war was not so relaxed as Rupert Brooke's ("Well, if Armageddon'southward on, I suppose i should exist there"), and Hollis suggests that information technology came from a fright of seeming unmanly, deriving virtually strongly from one incident where he failed to back up Robert Frost in a dispute with a gamekeeper. Also, the money was welcome: he could earn more every bit an officeholder than he did from his writing. The final third of the book becomes almost literally a life in verse: Hollis quotes generously from Thomas'southward piece of work as his poems transmute his daily lived experiences into art. This is welcome, though it remained the instance that the first one-half of the book triumphed over the second: considering the most extraordinary attribute of Thomas to me is not what he did with his poetic gift, or how the world lost it and so quickly, but that he managed to become there in the first place.

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Source: https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/matthew-hollis-now-all-roads-lead-to-france-the-last-years-of-edward-thomas/

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