Fonds GB 0210 RGTHOS - R. George Thomas (Edward Thomas) Research Papers

Professor Richard George Thomas, literary critic and editor, was born in the mining village of Pontlotyn, Glamorgan, in 1914. He was educated at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, where he graduated in English. Following a period spent in Iceland during the Second World War, he returned to Wales in 1946 to teach medieval and eighteenth century literature, and was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at University College Cardiff, in 1967. His main academic interest was the study of the work of the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917). His monograph, Edward Thomas, in the Writers of Wales series, was published in 1972, followed by his edition of The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1978), Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford University Press, 1985), and Edward Thomas: Selected Letters (Oxford University Press, 1995). R. George Thomas died at Cardiff, 23 February 2001.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917), poet and writer, was born Philip Edward Thomas in Lambeth to Welsh-born parents on 3 March 1878. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and Lincoln College, Oxford. Having left St Paul's, Thomas studied for the civil service examination, a move which expressed parental ambition rather than his own as he had reacted against the wordly views of his father, who worked for the Board of Trade and was prominent in Liberal politics. He was encouraged in his early literary ambitions by the critic James Ashcroft Noble and Thomas's first book, The Woodland Life, inspired by his love of the natural world, appeared as early as 1897. Thomas married Noble's daughter Helen (1877-1967) in 1899 and, having graduated from Lincoln College in 1900, made a precarious living as a literary reviewer for the Daily Chronicle whilst also writing essays, anthologies, guidebooks and folk-tales. He also published further books, including The Heart of England (1906), as well as biographical writings, most notably those on Richard Jefferies (1909), Maurice Maeterlinck (1911), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913). This period also produced his autobiographical works The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), The Icknield Way (1913) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914). Possibly from an overwhelming feeling that his creativity was shackled and frustrated, Thomas at this time suffered recurrent physical and psychological breakdowns which once took him to the brink of suicide. It was not until 1914 that he wrote his first 'real' poem, entitled 'Up in the Wind'. The wartime collapse of the literary market at last afforded Thomas more time to write poetry; over a space of two years, he was to write over one hundred and forty poems. In 1915 Thomas joined the Artists' Rifles; he was commissioned second lieutenant in 1916 and volunteered for service overseas. In April 1917 he was killed during the first hour of the battle of Arras in northern France and buried the following day on the outskirts of the town; he therefore did not live to see the publication of his Poems (1917) (under his pseudonym Edward Eastaway), nor the subsequent Last Poems (1918) and Collected Poems (1920). His wife Helen wrote of their time together in As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931). Thomas numbered amongst his poetical and literary influences Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, and W. H. Davies.