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    Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds
    Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds
    Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds

    By Edward Thomas

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    About this ebook

    This book is Edward Thomas's only book specifically for children. It contains 24 wonderful tales drawing influence from a very happy time in his life living on Elses Farm in Kent, England. Edward Thomas was an accomplished writer and his work included essays, travelogues, topographical descriptions, reviews, critical studies and biographies. He was killed in action in the First World War in 1917.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateSep 9, 2016
    ISBN9781473359734
    Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds
    Author

    Edward Thomas

    Edward Thomas was born near Uxbridge in 1943 and grew up mainly in Hackney, east London in the 1950s. His teaching career took him to cental Africa and the Middle East. Early retirement from the profession enabled him to concentrate on writing. Along with authorship of half a dozen books, he has contributed regular columns to several journals.

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      Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds - Edward Thomas

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      Edward Thomas

      Philip Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, England in 1878. His parents were Welsh migrants, and Thomas attended several schools, before ending up at St. Pauls. Never entirely happy with urban life – he took many trips to Wiltshire and Wales, fostering an attraction to the natural world which would inform much of his later poetry – Thomas led a reclusive early life, and began writing as a teenager. He published his first book, The Woodland Life (1897), at the age of just nineteen. A year later, he won a history scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford.

      In 1899, while still an undergraduate, Thomas married Helen Noble, daughter of the essayist and poet James Ashcroft Noble (1844-1896). Encouraged by his wife's father, Thomas committed himself to becoming a man of letters. He worked frantically, reviewing up to fifteen books a week (usually poetry collections) for the Daily Chronicle, and penning six collections of essays in eight years. Thomas was a skilful critic; in 1913, The Times described him as the man with the keys to the Paradise of English poetry. He also became a close friend of the Welsh poet W. H. Davies, whose career he almost single-handedly developed.

      Thomas was never entirely happy with life as a prolific essayist, however. In correspondence with the poet Gordon Bottomely, he described himself as a hack writer, a hurried and harried prose man whose exhaustion left his brain wild. Thomas suffered from chronic depression, apparently carrying a vial of poison (which he described as his saviour) with him at all times. In 1911, he suffered a severe mental breakdown.

      In the spring of 1914, in what was arguably the most formative event of his life, Thomas met the American poet Robert Frost. Although Frost is now one of America’s most adored poets, at this point no one would publish his work in the United States, and he had emigrated to England in search of artistic fortune. Thomas had previously reviewed Frost's work at great length, and, upon meeting, the men engaged in lengthly discussions on the nature and form of poetry.

      On one of their many long countryside walks, Frost suggested to Thomas that sections of his In Pursuit of Spring (1913) – a meditative travelogue documenting Thomas' pilgrimage by bicycle from Clapham Common, London, to the Quantock Hills of Somerset – might be turned into poems. Together, the two men experimented with composing lines that followed, in loose poetic form, the sound-patterns of speech — building on theories of rhythm and form Thomas had expressed in his critiques of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913).

      Frost's advice turned out to be transformative. Thomas returned to his accumulated writings with new imagination. He began to pen loose and lyrical poems, calling them quintessences of the best parts of my prose books which purged the stultifying effects of damned rhetoric from his writing. As well as being a creative release, Thomas found the process of writing poetry to be highly therapeutic; in his journals, he spoke of them as fostering a sense of strong mental calm.

      Thomas began writing poetry seriously in December of 1914 — five months after the onset of World War I. He published several poems under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, which variously baffled and delighted reviewers. Meanwhile, he deliberated over whether to join the war effort or not (Frost penned what would become his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken, in response to Thomas’s dilemma).

      Eventually, despite being overage, Thomas enlisted in a voluntary unit in July 1915. He then returned to his poetry with a renewed vigour. However, Thomas was not a war poet in the same sense as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon – the trenches barely feature in his work, and he only wrote one poem after reaching France – nor was he any less conflicted than these men about the conflict. For Thomas, World War I compounded a range of complex feelings he harboured regarding England, the countryside, culture and identity. Speaking of his enlistment in the essay 'This Is England', he said Something, I felt, had to be done before I could again look composedly at English landscape. However, he stressed elsewhere that I hate not Germans nor grow hot/With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.

      In November 1916, Thomas was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. Soon after arriving in France, Thomas was involved in the Battle of Arras, a British offensive. On Easter Monday (9th April), while standing to light his pipe, one of the last shells fired during the battle landed close to him, causing a concussive blast from which he didn't recover. He was aged 39.

      Despite being less well-known than other World War I poets, Thomas is regarded by many critics as one of the finest. Since the seventies, five new anthologies of his verse have appeared (the vast majority of Thomas' work wasn't published during his brief literary life), and the longtime British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes went so far as to call him the father of us all. In 2011, a biography of Thomas by Matthew Hollis entitled Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas won the Costa Biography Award.

      In 1985, Thomas was among sixteen World War I poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in

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