of ecstasy, an ecstasy which makes the self’s becoming ‘as nothing’ part of
its self-discovery. But Nancy argues that ecstasy occurs especially when the
subject is confronted by death, ‘that of which it is precisely impossible to
make a work’ ( 15 ); if he is right, then the poems that explore Thomas’s
ecstatic disappearance into the outdoor life of the countryside and the
trenches would be inseparable from his most heartfelt hope of self-
expression. Could we live in true ecstasy, concludes the essay, ‘each one
of us would express and represent all that we were’, for ‘our lives would be
poems beyond the dreams of Poe and Pater’.
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 107