When we look back on the period in English poetry that stretches from 1910 to the early 1920s, Edward Thomas looks more and more to be its most significant poet. That there were many poets of the Georgian persuasion writing at the time may come as a surprise to readers who identify the period exclusively with Pound, Eliot, and the modernist school. But even more surprising is the fact that Thomas, the best English poet of the period who did not belong to the modernist school, still remains a more or less obscure figure, especially in this country. This is true despite the fact that recent years have brought forth a good many books about Thomas’s life and work. That these have not had much of an effect on our view of the period is a measure of the influence the modernists (and their critics) continue to have in determining our view of this literary epoch.

To Robert Frost, who was living in England at the time and who had many affinities with certain aspects of the Georgian sensibility, Thomas was “at that moment [1913] . . . writing as good poetry as anybody alive, but in prose form where it did not declare itself.” When, at the prompting of Frost, Thomas finally did turn to poetry, his verse reflected the best qualities of his prose in distilled form: brilliant clarity devoid of all rhetoric and presumption. Thomas himself characterized something of its quality when he spoke, in