Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis

Edward Thomas was one of the three great English poets killed in the First World War (the others were Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg). Several books have been written about him — two, by his wife Helen and Eleanor Farjeon, the work of women who loved him — but this one is particularly welcome.

Matthew Hollis doesn’t pretend that Thomas was anything but a very difficult man, and his analyses of the poetry are full of insight, as he is a good poet himself. He is also good on the Georgian literary scene, ‘an astonishingly creative moment in English literature’, when younger writers were rebelling against Victorianism and preparing to go their separate ways.

Thomas was an Oxford undergraduate when he and Helen were obliged to get married; they would eventually have three children. To support his family, he did all kinds of literary jobs and became the most respected reviewer of his day.

But he suffered from terrible depressions, thought of suicide, and left home to tramp around Wales and southern England for weeks at a time. The most fruitful relationship of his life was with Robert Frost, whom he met in 1913, and each wrote one great poem in honour of their friendship: The Sun Used to Shine (Thomas), and The Road Not Taken (Frost).

It was Frost who persuaded him, very late in the day, to write poetry rather similar to his prose, following the patterns of ordinary speech. All these poems were written after the outbreak of war in August 1914.

Not all roads led to France. Millions of young men (including my grandfathers) were forced, nagged or cajoled into fighting, but Thomas was old enough and intelligent enough to have kept out of it. He did not believe in much of the war propaganda and remained a civilian for almost a year, writing unconventional poems based on his beloved countryside; his subjects are not roses and nightingales but badgers, tramps, nettles, horse-drawn ploughs and sleeping under the rain.

Yet these poems often have the shadow of the war in the background. “Only I am not dead/ Still breathing and interested” (Gone, Gone Again), he wrote, in words which make me shiver.

He took the decision to enlist without consulting his wife. His income from book reviewing was drying up and he was haunted by an argument with a gamekeeper who had waved a gun at him and made him fear he was a coward. Going to war was an honourable way of separating from his family and dicing with death. He said he was fighting for England, but also that, if historians decided the war had been a mistake, he would be dead and not care.

He was killed soon after he got to the Western Front and so wrote no war poetry in the ordinary sense.

If he could revisit England today, he would be aghast; the wild plants and birds and quiet country railway stations which he described have largely disappeared.

English poetry, which he helped to liberate from outdated forms, has also taken a road which was not his.

You don’t, however, have to know about contemporary poetry to appreciate this fine new book.