Poetry and the first world war The making of a voice The last
years of Edward Thomas EDWARD THOMAS was a late starter to
poetry. “I couldn’t write a poem to save my life,” he declared
aged 35, when a “literary hack” of minor biographies and travel
memoirs, struggling to support a wife and three children. A year
later, and three years before he was killed by a passing shell
in the Arras offensive in the first world war, he had written
and published some of the finest poems to come out of Britain at
the beginning of the 20th century. What changed Thomas from a
middling prose writer to a dazzling poet is the central theme of
Matthew Hollis’s engaging new book, which won two awards for
biography when it came out in Britain last year and is just now
being published in America. Mr Hollis, a poet and editor,
focuses on the last five years of Thomas’s life before he died
in 1917. His book begins in London, where Thomas visits a new
bookshop dedicated to poetry that had just opened in “shady
Bloomsbury”. Around this s