The poet Edward Thomas met one of the strangest deaths of the First World War. On Easter Monday 1917, on the first morning of the Battle of Arras, a stray German shell passed so close to him that the rush of air fatally compressed his lungs. He fell without a mark on his body. Tucked away in the pocket of his greatcoat was his last diary (NLW MS 24030A), each page of which bears the imprint of the shell’s shock wave, an eerie arc of creases.
Edward Thomas’s War Diary, showing the final entry, 8 April 1917
The diary has been very kindly donated to the Library by Mrs Jennifer Thomas, the wife of the poet’s late grandson, Edward Cawston Thomas, and it constitutes a significant addition to our extensive collection of Edward Thomas manuscripts. Written in thin ink, in a cramped hand, it contains pithy observations on life on the front line as well as vivid evocations of the natural world. It also contains Thomas’s last poem, ‘The sorrow of true love’.
Edward Thomas, Beautiful Wales (London, 1905)
Edward Thomas, who regarded himself as ‘mainly Welsh’, was born in London to an English mother and a Welsh speaking father. At Lincoln College Oxford he studied history under the Welsh educationist and cultural nationalist Sir Owen M. Edwards. The strong spiritual affinity that Thomas felt with Wales found expression in much of his early prose.
Before the war, he scraped a living as a critic, biographer and writer of travelogues. However, his close friend, the American poet Robert Frost – seeing the raw material of poetry in Thomas’s prose – urged him to express himself in verse. During his final two years Thomas produced a formidable body of over 140 poems that deal with the themes of transience, mortality and the natural world, using the simple language of everyday speech. This late flowering of creativity has placed Thomas among the most influential British poets of the 20th century. And it gives greater poignancy to the blank final pages of his diary.
Geraint Phillips
Very moving.