british poetry in the age of modernism

Thomas was picking up a theme of the poem ‘Liberty’ written a few weeks
beforehand:

And yet I still am half in love with pain,

With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,

With things that have an end, with life and earth

And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

What Thomas is not half in love with is Keats’s easeful death which
would ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’: although he had loved the
Nightingale Ode since boyhood, he once compared the ‘morbidity’ of its
tone to the Ode on Melancholy’s ‘connoisseurship’ of misery where ‘he
flatters life and the bitterness of it’.^24 Such unexpected venom indicates
Thomas’s strength of feeling about deliberately cultivating emotion: he
loathed the connoisseur’s tacit security which collects things to admire
them at a distance, just as he was convinced that ‘happiness become
conscious has deteriorated to pleasure, that life is not worth living for
the sake of its pleasures, that ecstasy sought and bought, as the mystics
have said, is impious’.^25 ‘Rain’ is a poem whose mental distraction finally
evades single-minded impulses towards death as well as life, for ecstasy is
inimical to any kind of self-determination. And it was this unwitting
connoisseurship of ecstasy that Thomas felt was the problem with large
swathes of Georgian and Imagist poetry, a problem inherited directly
from ecstasy’s proto-modernist prophet, Walter Pater.

thomas and pater

Thomas had been thinking about Pater all through the year previous to
writing the ‘Ecstasy’ essay, because he had been writing Pater’s critical
biography on commission. Most of its chapters are as padded-out and
rushed as Thomas’s other bread-and-butter prose, but the reason why
Thomas took it on is evident in the care he takes in certain chapters to
exact revenge on Pater’s model of thinking, feeling and writing. This was
the aesthetic doctrine he felt had strangled his own youthful prose and
consequently his own chances of artistic expression, and hence was partly
responsible for his enslavement to writing oversized biographies of sub-
jects such as, well, Walter Pater. But in thinking out what was wrong with
Pater’s approach to style, art and subsequently ecstasy, Thomas was also
working out what he felt was wrong with his Georgian and modernist
contemporaries, and unconsciously preparing his own future turn to
poetry. There is thus a good deal of contemporary art at stake in

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 73