3 F. R. Leavis,New Bearings in English Poetry(London: Chatto & Windus,
1932 ), pp. 68 – 9.
4 Selected Letters of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995 ), p. 118 ; review reprinted inA Language Not to be
Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas, ed. Edna Longley (Manchester:
Carcanet, 1981 ), p. 112.
5 ThomasSelected Letters,p. 118.
6 Thomas,Selected Prose,p. 114 ; ‘New Numbers’, in Thomas,Selected Letters,p. 106.
7 Thomas,Selected Prose, pp. 112 , 116.
8 Ibid., pp. 105 – 6.
9 Ibid.,p. 125.
10 Edward Thomas, ‘More Georgian Poetry’,The Bookman, April 1913 ,p. 47.
11 Thomas,Selected Letters,p. 93.
12 The text and title of this and all subsequent poems is taken fromThe Collected
Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978 ).
13 Eleanor Farjeon,Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years(London: Oxford
University Press, 1958 ), p. 154. Stan Smith expands its significance in
‘ “Literally, For This”: Metonymies of National Identity in Thomas, Yeats
and Auden’, inLocations of Literary Modernism, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M.
Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ), pp. 113 – 34.
14 ‘TheAttempt’,repr. in Thomas,Selected Prose,p. 261.
15 Farjeon,Edward Thomas,pp. 17 , 18.
16 Ibid., pp. 32 , 38.
17 Ibid., 43 , 58.
18 Two holograph notebooks marked ‘Fiction (Incomplete)’, signed and dated
Feb 25 , 1914 and April 7 , 1913 [i.e. 1914 ], Berg Collection, New York Public
Library.
19 [Ecstasy], ‘The History of Men is the History of Ecstasy’, Holograph draft of
an essay [ 1913 ], Berg Collection. All quotations are taken from the MS: R.
George Thomas has reproduced a portion of the shorter and substantially
different TS version in hisEdward Thomas: A Portrait(Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985 ), pp. 254 – 5.
20 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in hisSelected Essays
(London: Faber & Faber, 1951 ), p. 17.
21 This passage has been cancelled and some words are very difficult to make
out. In the first line, ‘Humour’ might be ‘stupor’; in the third, ‘tendencies’ is
my conjecture for an illegible word, and in the fourth ‘humanity’ might be
‘luminosity’.
22 Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797 – 1800 , ed. James Butler and Karen
Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992 ), p. 351.
23 Ibid. The ‘Ecstasy’ essay notes that Wordsworth was fascinated by distraction.
24 Edward Thomas,Keats(London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1914 ), pp. 57 , 53 , 54.
25 MS entitled ‘An Essay on Passion in Contemporary Fiction’, [Essays] ( 6 ),
Berg Collection.
Notes to pages 64 – 73 209