![]() In his lifetime Thomas published only a handful of poems, which came out under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway in An Annual of New Poetry in the spring of 1917, shortly before his death. ![]() ‘These poems,’ he wrote, ‘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.’ As a prolific reviewer of contemporary verse, Thomas knew all too well the exaggerations of rhetoric that dominated turn-of-the-century English poetry, and which generated both his and Frost’s quiet revolution, and the more aggressive one masterminded by Eliot and Pound. Once inspiration began to ‘run’, to use his own term, it ran fast, and over the next two and a bit years he wrote 144 poems that proved as ‘revolutionary’ in their way as he had declared those of Frost to be in a review of North of Boston published in July 1914. This was Thomas’s first, unashamedly Frost-inspired attempt to wring the neck of poetic rhetoric. Questioned the fire and spoke: ‘My father, he Heaved as the cabbage bubbled, and the girl Like a number of Thomas’s earliest poems, ‘Up in the Wind’ began life as a prose sketch of the kind that feature in his numerous travel books, and its poetic effectiveness owes much to its closeness to prosaic description: This isn’t Thomas himself speaking, but the unhappy daughter of the landlord of The White Horse, a pub not far from Steep in Hampshire, where Thomas and his family had settled seven years earlier. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the same violent image: ‘I could wring the old thing’s neck that put it here!’ ![]() The line must have lodged in Edward Thomas’s mind: in May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. ‘Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!’ Verlaine resonantly, and eloquently, declared in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874.
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