Now All Roads Lead To France

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war. The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old. It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

Contains poems, without any commentary, enabling them to be used either as student reference material or as 'clean' copies for the examination.

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. This book includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material.

"Edward Thomas was the most beguiling of the poets who lost their lives in the First World War. More or less unread in his lifetime, his writing has had a powerful influence on poetry today. This account of his final five years is centred on his extraordinary friendship with [the American poet] Robert Frost and Thomas's decision, in 1915, to enlist in the army and go to fight in France."--Publisher description.

Here is a portrait of the poet by his wife which has no equal, not even in Mary Shelley's sketches of her husband.New StatesmanUnder Storm's Wing collects all that Helen Thomas (1877-1967) wrote about the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917): the celebrated volumes As It Was and World Without End, her letters to Edward, and separate memoirs of her meetings with W.H. Davies, D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and W.H. Hudson. The book has been assembled by Myfanwy, the youngest daughter of Edward and Helen. Myfanwy includes her own enchanted account of childhood with her father, and the tragedy of his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917. She adds an appendix of six letters from Robert Frost to Edward Thomas.Helen wrote As It Was, the story of her courtship and early marriage, shortly after Edward's death, and World Without End a few years later. In the original editions and later reprints fictitious names were used for the protagonists. In this edition the actual names are restored.The book provides a brilliant, lasting evocation of one of Britain's best-loved poets.

'I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose.' Fired by his abiding love of the English landscape, the poetry of Edward Thomas is some of the most astonishing of the twentieth century. A journalist, essayist and critic for many years, he was encouraged to write verse by his friend Robert Frost. He produced a late outburst of poetry of extraordinary beauty and mystery about the subjects closest to his heart: rural England and its inhabitants, landscape, atmosphere, transience, endurance and death. By 1917, when he was killed on the Western Front, he had earned his place as one of England's most valued poets. This selection brings together his finest verse with his most vivid prose writings on the countryside.

Interweaving letters from men at the front with stories of life at home, this book describes the Great War's impact on the city of Bath. It is a story of grief, suffering and anger - but also features laughter. With minor variations, it could be the story of almost any town or city in the country at that time.

Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's. Though a fragment, in many senses it is far more: in the words of its author 'no less than an autobiography . . . an attempt to put down on paper what [this author] sees when he thinks of himself from 1878 to about 1895'. The Childhood of Edward Thomas was not published until 1938, over two decades after Thomas originally showed the manuscript to a publisher. Those eventual publishers, Faber & Faber, were building on their release two years earlier of Thomas's Collected Poems, for which he was becoming best known. This edition includes Edward Thomas's 'War Diary,' a record of the last three months of his life when, as an elderly - at thirty-eight - subaltern he fought among the misery of the trenches. To witness Thomas's childhood memoir and wartime diaries in such close proximity is to have a moving incarnation of his distinctive voice, its clarity and - even in war - its unfailing attention to his fellow-creatures.