Thanks again, Clive. What an interesting poet Thomas is. I like your comments on "The Cherry Trees," which seems so slight at first, but rewards staying with it for a while.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (2nd edition) has the following quote in the headnote to its Edward Thomas selection, from a review Thomas wrote of a Robert Frost collection:
"These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets.... Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain, and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion."
Which no doubt applies to his own poetic practice as well.
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