british poetry in the age of modernism

always present, Thomas did not make his own the central focus of his
poetry; indeed, he fictionalised his own suicide attempt as ‘vanity’, its self-
importance inimical to the way he thought poetry worked.^14 Rather, his
distinctive poetic explores a mode of agency in which self-expression
would become inseparable from self-dispossession. It was while he was
reviewing Lawrence and reading Frost, the Imagists and the Georgians
that Thomas began to write an essay on the topic which gives an name to
this contrary condition: ecstasy.

ecstasy

It began in 1913 when its shy author suddenly found courage in a ‘fit of
curiosity and daring’ to ask a publisher to give him a contract for a book
he felt would really say what he wanted, unlike his usual drudgery, and
perhaps belonging to the poetic impulse that his correspondent Eleanor
Farjeon had assured him he possessed:

Now perhaps the strong warm tide which you tell me of is beginning to reach
me. I wish it would – I was going to say with all my heart, but that is or was the
difficulty. If it were not I should not hesitate to do so much about Ecstasy.
However I am really quartering the ground now.( 28 July)^15

This hope that he would be able finally to write something from the
heart did not last. Struggling with deadlines (Thomas published four
books that year alone), he was overcome by another wave of grey depres-
sion, and when came back to it the topic seemed ironically remote:

I feel cured of the ambition to do Ecstasy & must seek for something more
profane & more suitable for a material if insubstantial pen. ( 18 September)

Today I began writing about Ecstasy and very badly and the only thing to do for
my peace is to go on and on writing and see what happens. Now a great deal
might happen in a few days.(undated, mid-October)^16

Nothing did happen: Thomas abandoned the essay, considering it
‘mostly muck & so ill-arranged that it could not be re-written’. But
‘Ecstasy’ is important in Thomas’s life for two reasons. Firstly, because its
impulse represented the beginning of the burst of creativity that culmin-
ated in his own poems less than a year later. After abandoning the essay, he
tried autobiography (posthumously published asThe Childhood of Edward
Thomas), but remained unsatisfied: ‘I want a subject to substitute for
Ecstasy’, he wrote to Farjeon in January 1914.^17 Over the next two months,
he began two prose fictions, the first which explores mystical-natural states

68 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism