Thomas, (Philip) Edward

(1878-1917)

   Born in Lambeth, London, the son of a clerk at the Board of Trade, he was educated at St. Paul's School and graduated B.A. in modern history from Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1900. He was a journalist before World War I and began writing poetry in 1912 under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway; he devoted himself fully to poetry in 1913 after a meeting with Robert Frost, the American poet, who was then living in England. Thomas joined the Artists' Rifles in 1915 as a private, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting, and was killed in action at Arras soon after he arrived in France as an officer. Most of his poems - often about the English countryside - were published posthumously, and few are about the war. One links the countryside with the war: "In Memoriam." In his brief 15-year career he produced over two dozen books and wrote many reviews, focusing on local history and literary figures. Some of his poems: "Adlestrop," "Bird's Nests," "Haymaking," "SedgeWarblers," "The Brook," "The Cherry Tree," "The Sheiling," "Under the Woods."

   Sources: Come Hither. Walter de la Mare, ed. Knopf, 1957; Dover Publications, 1995. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds. J.D. McClatchy, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Poetry for Pleasure: A Choice of Poetry and Verse on a Variety of Themes. Ian Parsons, ed. W.W. Norton, 1977. Splinters: A Book of Very Short Poems. Michael Harrison, ed. Oxford University Press, 1989. The Artist's Rifles, Edward Thomas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artists%27_Rifles). The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas. Oxford University Press, 1979. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of English History in Verse. Kenneth Baker, ed. Faber and Faber, 1988. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.