Poetry Classics
1 total work
"Bloomsbury Poetry Classics" are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Edward Thomas was born in 1878. A Londoner of Welsh ancestry, he went to St Paul's School and to Oxford before setting up as a freelance essayist and biographer. He moved to the Kent countryside and specialized in rural subjects. By his mid-thirties he had published 30 books. Fifteen years of badly paid hack-work brought Thomas to the verge of mental breakdown. In 1914, encouraged by Robert Frost, whose own work he had praised in a review, he decided to try his hand at verse, a decision that coincided with the outbreak of war. Thomas enlisted, and over the next three years wrote nearly 150 poems, many of which did not appear until after his death. He was killed in Arras in 1917, aged 39.