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An Edward Thomas Revival. A GREAT WELSHMAN WHO LOVED WALES. POET, ESSAYIST AND MYSTIC. The announcement by the Gregynog Press that its special limited edition of the poems of Edward Thomas has been immediately sold out calls attention to the remarkable interest now being taken in this eminent Welshman who died in the service of his country, and is only now, some years later, coming into his own. The Gregynog Press had previously issued a limited edition of his essays on TVales-also sold out-and several London publishers now announce his work in new and popular editions. Below we give a study of the man, of the forces which influenced him, together with a critical appreciation of his poetry. By Geraint Goodwin. BEFORE Edward Thomas' untimely death in France in 1917 he had already become an established figure in the literary world of his day. But he was an established figure and not, in the sense in which we know it, a popular figure. He was loved and venerated by his brother writers and appreciated by a dis- criminating public, but it is doubtful whether they could foresee the position to which he would attain a few short years after his death. And in his most important aspect he is indeed a dis- covery," for his poems, which are now being eagerly sought, were a product of his latter years, of which his earlier admirers had no know- ledge, inasmuch as they were not written. It is a problem for the future historian, this- how Thomas, whose collected poems fill but a moderate volume, should quietly and almost stealthily supplant those men who, a few years ago, were sure of their own immortality and who now are almost, if not entirely, forgotten. Wales may well rejoice in this recognition of one of its own tragic geniuses, for a genius he was, though the term in its modern application hardly conveys the quiet and fragrant sincerity of either the man or his work. Wales may re- joice because the strange and wistful beauty which was peculiarly his own was also peculiarly Welsh. He was not only one of the most eminent Welshmen writing in English, but one of the most typically Celtic in his inspiration. He loved his own country and his own people, and his love is shown in many pages of beautiful prose. He was one of the first men to recognise the work of Mr W. H. Davies, and to the end of his days this quiet and steady patriotism was one of the chief influences of his life. Edward Thomas was the son of the late Mr Philip Thomas (a native of Tredegar and an old pupil of Sirhowy), an energetic civil servant who won honour and distinction in the Board of Trade. He was, according to the poet's wife, who has given a vivid pen picture of this London Welsh home, a self-satisfied, hard-working type of Welshman," and she adds, a student with a very narrow view of life." His mother, for- merly Miss Mary Elizabeth Townsend, of New- port, is described as a pretty fair-haired woman with a sweet, melancholy face," and she goes on to say that the poet got his looks from his mother and much of his temperament, and he adored her-if such a word can be used of so reserved, so undemonstrative an affection, which never wavered." The only other influences of Thomas' early life -important influences as they proved to be- were Nature and the Helen of the poems, the girl who eventually became his wife. Her little memoir, As it Was," which gives a frank and detailed account of their life together, is in itself a thing of beauty, and is to my mind as touching as the letters of Abelard and Heloise. The man himself is revealed in his poems, and as long as we have them we shall never feel the want of a biography. His wife speaks of him as a tall, loose-limbed man, broad-shouldered and athletic, with a beautifully-shaped head, fair hair, and dreamy and meditative eyes. It was," she says, a most striking face, recalling a portrait of Shelley in its sensitive, melancholy beauty," an account which those who knew him endorse. His life was, in a comparative sense, unevent- ful. His first book appeared when he was 19, and from then on until his death there followed some forty or so, dealing for the most part with his country tramps, but including lives of Keats, Swinburne, Maeterlinck, and strangely enough, the Duke of Marlborough. He married early, and it was the responsibilities of a family, no doubt, which led to hack bookmaking and drudgery which, if it did not actually impair his work, used up the best years of his life. And then, shortly before the war, this man, who was pre-eminently a poet, discovered he could write poetry. With his battery in France he continued in this last love of his, and it is these fragments, the worth of which he himself was too modest to admit, that constitute his most solid hold on pos- terity. It is sad to think that the two poets who found themselves during the war were also killed by it, and both before they had attained the maturity of their genius. Thomas was killed in France Rupert Brooke died in a troopship off the Isles of Greece. They both died as they lived, and to my mind, recall the parallel in- stances of Keats and Shelley. Brooke, the golden youth, died in the glorious land of poetry and fantasy, as Shelley died in the Gulf of Leg- horn, and for Thomas, who like Keats, weaved his dreams for the most part in the drabness of the London streets, came one of a million bullets in the mud of the trenches. The similarity between Keats and Thomas goes deeper in deal-