Books and Arts; Book Review;Poetry and the first world war;Late starter;

Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. By Matthew Hollis.

Edward Thomas was a late starter to poetry. “I couldn't write a poem to save my life,” he declared aged 35, when a “l(fā)iterary hack” of minor biographies and travel memoirs, struggling to support a wife and three children. A year later, and three years before he was killed by a passing shell in the Arras offensive in the first world war, he had written and published some of the finest poems to come out of Britain at the beginning of the 20th century.

What changed Thomas from a middling prose writer to a dazzling poet is the central theme of Matthew Hollis's engaging new book, which won two awards for biography when it came out in Britain last year and is just now being published in America. Mr Hollis, a poet and editor, focuses on the last five years of Thomas's life before he died in 1917.

His book begins in London, where Thomas visits a new bookshop dedicated to poetry that had just opened in “shady Bloomsbury”. Around this shop circled the poets that made up literary London at that time: Ezra Pound, an American, who would greet startled visitors to his flat in a purple dressing gown; W.B. Yeats, an Irish poet and playwright who shunned newfangled electricity in favour of candlelight for his evening readings; and Rupert Brooke, a dashing young English poet, who would die a soldier in 1915 from an infection caught while stationed near Greece, and whose poetry sold 250,000 copies in the decade after his death.

Less glamorous or eccentric than these figures, Thomas was a prolific and occasionally acerbic book reviewer, six feet tall, “slim, loose-limbed and vigorous”, who struggled with near-suicidal depression. He had married while still an undergraduate at Oxford and his relationship with his wife Helen was a troubled one. He often spent time away on the long journeys needed for his travel books, such as the “The Icknield Way”.

Mr Hollis is adept at evoking the atmosphere of the time, and at negotiating the complicated friendships and squabbles between these poets. But it is when Thomas meets Robert Frost, a “Yankee” poet determined to be published in Britain that his book comes to life. It was Frost—a stocky, quick-tempered figure—who persuaded Thomas to write poems, and who believed that “words exist in the mouth, not in books”. Once Thomas decided to write verse, he did so quickly. Spurred on by Frost, and by the oncoming threat of war, at one point he wrote nearly a poem a day, including his much loved “Adlestrop” with its “l(fā)azed, heat-filled atmosphere…of that last summer before the war”. Mr Hollis re-creates Thomas's process of writing by comparing the differing drafts of his poems, giving life to his process of composition, and charting the correspondence between Thomas and Frost once the latter had moved back to America.

In many ways, Thomas was a difficult, reticent figure, who was quite capable of signing off letters to his mother “Yours ever, Edward Thomas”. Even after he had enrolled in the Artists Rifles regiment, he remained painfully shy about his work, hiding his poetry among calculations on the trajectory of shells, or disguising it as prose. This may be one reason why Mr Hollis tends to address his subject formally throughout his book, frequently by his full name, and does not delve—beyond polite speculation—into the various extramarital romances Thomas may have had. Those who want such details will have to go elsewhere. Instead, Mr Hollis captures something far greater than a man's personal life, and far more elusive: the desire and struggle to write, even when you begin, as Thomas put it, “at 36 in the shade”.