Poetry Criticism | Thomas, Edward - J. Middleton Murry (essay date 1920)

J. Middleton Murry (essay date 1920)

SOURCE: Murry, J. Middleton. “The Poetry of Edward Thomas.” In Aspects of Literature, pp. 29-38. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1920.

[In the following essay, the author, a British literary critic and editor of Rhyme magazine, concludes that Thomas is “not a great poet,” but nevertheless praises the search for truth in Thomas's poetry, comparing him favorably to Keats.]

We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward Thomas.¹ They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There will be the triumphal arch...

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