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Beginnings (1878-1880) -- 'All being, doing and suffering' (1880-1888) -- 'The foolish years' (1889-1893) -- St Paul's and Helen Noble: Alone together (1894-1897) -- A glimpse of paradise (October 1897-September 1898) -- Paradise gained (1898-1899) -- Paradise lost (1899-1900) -- Grub street (September 1900-September 1901) -- Rose acre cottage (October 1901-July 1903) -- 'The valley of the shadow': Ivy cottage, Bearsted Green (July 1903-May 1904) -- Elses farm (May 1904-October 1906) -- Berryfield cottage: 'When I first I came here I had hope' (December 1906-February 1907) -- Hope and loss of hope (January 1907- December 1909) -- 'Your hurried and harried prose man': Wick green (December 1909-December 1910) -- The Bax-Baynes effect (1911-1912) -- Pursued by the other in pursuit of Spring (January-September 1913) -- 'The only brother I ever had' (6 October 1913-March 1914) -- 'While we two walked slowly together': Thomas and Frost in Gloucestershire (April-July 1914) -- The sun used to shine (August-September 1914) -- The road taken (September-November 1914) -- 'The only begetter' (December 1914) -- This England (January-February 1915) -- Marlborough and the fields of Flanders (March-July 1915) -- The extreme decision (July-November 1915) -- 'A heart that was dark' (November 1915-August 1916) -- The long goodbye (August 1916-January 1917) -- 'No more goodbyes now' (January-April 1917) In this first full-length biography of Edward Thomas for three decades, Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, a leading authority on the poets of the First World War, brings new life to the story of the man now acknowledge to be one of the major literary figures of the period, the poet and prose writer whom Walter de la Mare called 'a mirror of England'. Extensively illustrated throughout with a wealth of new material and told with clarity, panache and wit, Thomas's life makes for absorbing reading: his early forced marriage, his dependence on opium, his friendships with leading figures such as Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupurt Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Hilaire Belloc, Eleanor Farjeon and Robert Frost and the events leading up to his death in France in 1917. Moorcroft Wilson dispels the myth-making surrounding Thomas in order to reveal his true worth as a writer and as a war poet equal in talent to such great contemporaries as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. With startling new information on the true details of Thomas's death at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917, his attitude to the army and his relationship with his loving wife, Helen, as well as a reconsideration of the fashioning of Thomas as depressive and melancholic, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras discovers the man whose contribution to English poetry cannot be overstated, whose work can now be seen to be 'situated on the cusp of history and on the brink of modern selfhood'. In this remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the poet, Moorcroft Wilson shows that Thomas's work could not be more important to the literary world of today; this is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. -- from dust jacket
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