Poetry involves an inevitable difference between words and mind that
speech cannot override; indeed, itdependson the disparity between inside
and outside that it is always trying to cross. Thomas’s point is provoked
by his discussion of Pater’s belief that ‘literature finds its specific excel-
lence in the absolute correspondence of the form to its import’ ( 196 );
making speech such a correspondence would override the unknownness
of oneself and other people, and confirm Pater’s underlying ideal of
literature as militantly self-determining, an ideal that it has been his
book’s constant mission to attack. It is important to bear this passage in
mind when we read Thomas’s heartfelt praise of Frost’s ‘revolutionary’
poems, written three months after his review of the Imagists:
With a confidence like genius, he has trusted his conviction that a man will not
easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply, and
he has turned it over until he has no doubt what it means to him, when he has no
purpose to serve beyond expressing it, when he has no audience to be bullied or
flattered, when he is free, and speech takes one form and no other.^39
For all his admiration for Frost’s theories and his verses, this passage
indirectly diagnoses why Thomas’s poetry is not the same as Frost’s – why
his speech is consistently rhymed and patterned in a much more struc-
tured way than Frost’s favourite laconic blank verse. Thomas thought
Frost’s speakers knew what they meant and where they were coming from,
but Thomas was ever doubting himself; and as an army officer, a sufferer
from depression or just a shy Englishman, neither could he fully share
Frost’s American confidence in his own freedom. The unity of agency and
purpose that Thomas saw behind Frost’s speech was not his own,
for Thomas’s patterns suggest forces, restrictions and connections that
undercut or overrun the speaking voice’s present, and displace its speaker.
In fact, Frost’s ideas about speech and literature were important to
Thomas in just this respect. Frost did not want a transcript of a conversa-
tion, but a poem that had kept the ‘sound of sense’. This is the unique
rhythmic and tonal curvature of people’s sentences, what he called the
sound of ‘voices behind a door that cuts off words’.^40 The ‘sound of sense’
is so because it is overheard by someone who is not the speaker, and of
whom the speaker is not aware. In this way it concurs with what Thomas
had declared a few years earlier: ‘Love-poetry, like all other lyric poetry, is
in a sense unintentionally overheard, and only by accident and in part
understood, since it is written not for anyone, far less for the public, but
for the understanding spirit that is in the air roundabout or in the sky or
somewhere’.^41
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 85