Poetry Criticism | Thomas, Edward - Clive Wilmer (essay date March-April 2001)

Clive Wilmer (essay date March-April 2001)

SOURCE: Wilmer, Clive. “Edward Thomas: Englishness and Modernity.” PN Review 138, 27, no. 4 (March-April, 2001): 59-64.

[In the following essay, Wilmer, a poet himself, reads several poems by Thomas to argue that poems such as “Old Man,” “Lob,” and “Fifty Faggots” wrestle with Thomas's complex and sometimes contradictory understanding of Englishness, patriotism, and nostalgia.]

On 1 May 1909, Edward Thomas sent a book he was reviewing to his friend Gordon Bottomley. ‘Here,’ he says in an accompanying letter, ‘is Ezra Pound & I think he has very great things in him & love poems & the “Famam librosque”—in fact nearly all—are extraordinary achievements.’ The following month his review of the book appeared:

Carelessness of sweet sound and of all the old tricks makes Mr Pound's book rather prickly to handle at first … For brusque intensity of effect...

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