chapter 4
The simplicity of W. H. Davies
‘He has no idea of proportion’, wrote an exasperated Edward Thomas to
his friend Gordon Bottomley in 1906.^1 Thomas was frustrated with his
poetic discovery, W. H. Davies, a one-legged tramp and professional
beggar who had paid for the publication of his own poems from his
hostel in Southwark in 1905 , and sent copies to leading reviewers. One
had found its way to Thomas, who was, at first, stunned:
He can write commonplace or inaccurate English, but it is also natural to him to
write, such as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness and felicity
which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity
or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds, and where
else today shall we find simplicity like this?^2
Finding in Davies the Wordsworthian simplicity and compactness he
sought for his own writing, Thomas visited him in the doss-house and
offered to co-rent with him a little cottage in Kent where they could both
get on with their writing. Davies accepted, and the arrangement worked
for a while until Davies found simple living in the country a little dull and
gradually went back to writing (and, apparently, begging) in London to
make ends meet.^3 It was an amicable parting: Thomas continued to praise
Davies’s work highly for its simplicity and naturalness, but, as his men-
tion of Davies’s occasional ‘commonplace’ writing and his comment to
Bottomley indicate, he also began to worry about the inconsistencies of
Davies’s ‘natural’ output. In a 1908 review, for example, he remarks in Davies
‘a fresh and unbiased observation’ but also a certain naı ̈ve egoism, ‘always
neglecting what is not of first-rate importance to himself ’, which is scarcely an
unbiased viewpoint.^4 In another review of the same book, Thomas felt
Davies’s outlook purified the reader from the paraphernalia of modern life:
The simple, lucid expression of beauty and joy is a thing to wonder at
continually... the air they breathe is of such astonishing purity that I could
scarcely endure the stale sight of half the things that met my eyes in the street
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