Poetry Criticism | Thomas, Edward - Peter Mitchell (essay date summer 1986)

Peter Mitchell (essay date summer 1986)

SOURCE: Mitchell, Peter. “Edward Thomas and the Georgians.” University of Toronto Quarterly 55, no. 4 (summer 1986): 359-74.

[In the following essay, the author examines Thomas's relationship to the Georgian poets, considering Thomas's depiction of nostalgia, pastoralism, and class relations in such poems as “The Gypsy,” “Old Man,” and “Lob.”]

Leavis was wrong about Edward Thomas. This judgment was put to me during a typically uneasy supervision with an eminent scholar. Leavis had used Thomas in the second chapter of New Bearings to announce the shift from a Victorian to a Modern point of view. In Thomas we had a poet who could not be associated with the Georgians, whom Leavis viewed as backward-looking. Thomas, it was argued, was ‘a very original poet who devoted great technical subtlety to the expression of a distinctively modern sensibility.’¹ The specific...

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