Welsh Journals

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EDWARD THOMAS. Robert P. Eckert. Dent, 10s. 6d. Edward Thomas was thirty-seven when he was killed in the front-line near Arras in 1917. Of Welsh extraction, born in London and living most of his life in the English countryside, he was the author of some twenty-seven books before writing, in the last two years of his life, under the encouragement and advice of Robert Frost, the mass of poems upon which rests his present claim to attention. All this we are told in the 180 pages of biography in this dull and badly written book, with information concerning his acquaintances, habits and circumstances, during that miserable period of hack writing to earn money in order to support his family, which terminated in the abrupt poetic flowering of the last years before his death. Thomas was one of the best representatives of that queer genus, the nature poet' which has hovered along the fringe of our culture since the beginning of this century, and it seems symbolically appropriate that as such he should have met his death in the Great War, a historical landmark which surgically adapted our sentiments to the requirements of a fully industrialized world. Ed- ward Thomas was a better poet than his contemporaries like Gibson, Hodgson and others because he was nostalgic, because he really experienced the sadness of this change. All poets who can be placed in a specific category, whose verse does not cover and transfigure the whole of their experience, must of necessity be minor figures. Thomas was, of course, a very good minor poet. His poetry, as de la Mare has said, sprang rather from a saturation than from moments of intense vision, and it is this which gives it, like that of his master, Frost, its pedestrian form, its slow, stumbling speech-rhythms, its lack of technical interest. Thomas seems to have been a wise and simple man, melancholy and reserved, not much given to abstract thinking, fortunate in his marriage. His friends were people like W. H. Davies, Ralph Hodgson and Charles Dalmon, very minor figures whom he accepted at the rather inflated valuation of his times. There are 328 pages in this book, 145 of which are devoted to an absurdly full bibliography. This may be very interesting to a handful of people who collect' Thomas, like the American author, but there seems no adequate reason for binding it in with the man's Life.' D. S. SAVAGE. FROM MR. SPENDER'S TRANSLATION BUREAU. Poems. Garcia Lorca. (Tr. Stephen Spender and J, L. Gili). Dolphin Press. Is. 6d. Lorca was a poet caught in war and done in as many more of his generation will be done in now. His history is made the more conspicuous by an early death, the manner of his murder brings down obloquy on makers of wars and murderers of poets. One does not have to take sides and say I am with This and against That, the wanton slaughter of Lorca fills one with loathing for the whole frame that contains This and That. As a poet Lorca. stands where some of us realize we should go, but where none of us has reached. His image is as sharp as the eye, his epithet exact as