Edward Thomas (and Robert Frost)
 

This is very good ... https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-thomas-review

Thanks, David - that is a good review, and I'd not known about Frost's role in the story. I like the Thomas review of Yeats, "moving about in a world where perfect dreams are as cheap as evening papers." That is incisive.

I have to say I find Ted Hughes tedious and bombastic. He is constantly cited in the UK poetry world - as at the end here - and is to my mind underserving of such attention.

Cheers,
John

John, just in case I misled you, the "This is very good" referred to the book itself, which I am currently reading. (You probably got that.)

And let me see if I can change your opinion on Hughes, when he is very good (as he often was, especially earlier on) ... https://genius.com/Ted-hughes-the-bull-moses-annotated

(There's a typo in the transcription, I think.)

Cheers

David

There have been a couple of threads about this before. Here's the last one, with a link to the first one in it.

Duncan

I love Thomas' poetry. A reading of Adlestrop by Richard Burton (yes that Richard Burton) that I heard convinced me to start writing poetry after a long hiatus. It's one I have in my head – great to pull it now and then. That said, I found this book hard rowing. It was very one-note – Thomas as martyr. I too did not know of the Frost/Thomas influence, but it made perfect sense. As to Hughes, though he is celebrated as an observer of animals, to me they are always "Other" in his poems, unlike say the poet's encounter with the Fish in Bishop's poem, or even the skunks at the end of Skunk Hour, by (God help us) Robert Lowell. Only in that prose poem of rescuing the lambing ewe taken straight from his journals, do I see Hughes and the animal joined in any way that is profound.

Have you read Crow, that is a wonderful book, it clawed me into love with it.
Funnily enough, I have a vaguely similar reaction to Thomas and Frost. I would rather have Hughes's othering energy of language and beasts over Thomas or Frost's blandnesses.
There is an lrb article about their relationship that you might like, David.

I have a colleague who has A2 facsimiles of Baskin's illustrations to Crow - an early edition, I think, or a limited print-run - I'd have to ask them -

either way, they are extraordinary. One of the reasons I love broadsides. I wonder if Hughes was hate-able, and if hate-able is the opposite to urbane.

The Dymock poets are what they are, but personally I like it best when they overspill into different worlds, or where they are allowed critically to stray.

I love Robert Graves, though - their elan, their stupid-loveliness.

And then there's Ivor Gurney, whose work I always feel that I should like, but I still can't make myself like it.

Sarah-Jane

I don’t hate Hughes, I just find his poetry bores and sometimes vaguely nauseates me - an interesting combination. But he is most certainly hated by a good number of Sylvia Plath fans.
I’ll take a look at Crow. That may be the book I disliked enough not to open Hughes again for decades. “perfect / pike in all parts” I thought was very nice, but “terrifying are the thrushes on the lawn” I thought remarkable bombast - or as Horace puts it, ridiculus mus.

Cheers,
John

I think Hughes' "translation" of Ovid is sensational. It's often dissed among our crowd because it's done in free verse and apparently isn't the most "accurate" of the bunch, but I found it beautiful and enthralling nonetheless.

I'm with you on Crow, Cameron. Also -- something I only recently found out -- did you know he wrote Crow heavily under the influence of Vasko Popa? And if you don't know Popa, do check him out. I imagine you'd love him. I think he's excellent. I have the Selected Poems translated by Charles Simic, it's very reasonably priced, too.

Matt

Me too. Not a great enthusiast for Frost, though.

Thanks for the reference to the lrb article, Cameron.

David

Is Thomas really a Dymock poet, though, Sarah-Jane? I know he tends to get lumped in with them, but I think he's far greater than that.

Perhaps I'll know better when I've finished the book. But he makes quite a few appearances in The Rattle Bag, which is more than be said (even wildly) about, say, Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater, who seem ineffably minor by comparison.

But them's just my thoughts.

David

David, I think that's fair. The Dymock poets (or the people articulating the Dymock poets) will claim him, but how far that claim is justified is another question entirely.

Sarah-Jane

(edited quickly to say that I think the Gloucester Uni people are starting to be interested in the Dymock poets, which possibly will be a result of place-making/marketing (she says cynically) and I will keep, as far as I have time, an eye on what their articulation of him might be)

I ordered the book, David Callen. I think I'll like it a lot.

I hope you do, Tim.

And I found this the other night, just by chance - a Thomas-influenced poem by Alun Lewis (1915 - 1944). Poignantly, he was born the same year as my father. My dad made it way past 1944.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...-by-alun-lewis

Alun Lewis’s “All day It Has Rained” is a fine and attractive poem, and it was good to see it picked out by Carol Rumens back 2015. She has sensible things to say about it.

One sentence, however, gave me pause. She writes that “Lewis had visited Thomas’s grave at Steep in 1940.” As I understand it, Thomas is buried in Agny Military Cemetery in France (Plot 1, Row C, Grave 43: see the following link and image: https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/thomas_e.htm). I have not visited it myself, though a close friend of mine has. I cannot account for Carol Rumens's statement. Perhaps others can.

In this country, Edward Thomas is commemorated in Westminster Abbey, in All Saints Church in Steep, and by a sarsen stone erected in 1937 not far away on Shoulder of Mutton Hill. Some may find the following page of interest: https://www.edwardthomaspoetryplaces.com.

Clive Watkins

I, too, liked 'All Day It Has Rained." Its irregularities would normally have irked my ire, but that didn't happen here. The poem is limber but not loose. Lewis maintains such tight control over his material that the tone is unwavering.

I like the poetry of WW I, which is suffused with so much sadness. Many years ago, Brad Leithauser wrote an essay for the New Criterion called 'A Footnote for Housman.' Near the end of his paper, Leithauser said he had winnowed the poems down to his 12 favorites, including this four-line masterpiece, which will stay with you forever. "On the first couple of readings," he wrote, "I thought it lovely, but now I feel it's something better than lovely."

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

Yes, what a quatrain.

Cheers,
John

Since David gave the year of his death as 1944, it's natural to assume that Alun Lewis died in WW II. And he did die in the war, but he died by his own hand. Lewis was stationed in Burma, where he fought against the Japanese. During a lull in the fighting, he shot himself in the head. I couldn't begin to fathom a motive, but I wouldn't be quick to blame the war. They say that the seeds of suicide are planted early.

Those links are really good, Clive - especially the Edward Thomas Poetry Places. Thanks for them. (Coincidentally, the Poets' Graves' Forum - now defunct, sadly - was the first where I partook of online poetry. There are a few other old PG-ers around here too, I think.)

Tim, thanks for that quatrain too. It is very good. But I think that suicide is not necessarily certain in Lewis's case (although very possible). The Army said he was "accidentally wounded by a pistol shot". How very equivocal. How very Army.

Just for fun, here's the only Ted Hughes poem I ever really liked:
https://allpoetry.com/poem/8495307-Wodwo-by-Ted-Hughes

That is a good one indeed, Gail.

David

With regard to Sarah-Jane's observation upthread about the place of Gloucester University in the study of the Dymock poets, this might be an interesting event. After all, the University is the repository of the Dymock archives.

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/ticke...kxgxbl&target=