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• Hollis has restricted himself to Thomas's last years, during which time, bolstered by the friendship and support of Robert Frost, he turned from writing prose to poetry. Thomas's writing life is naturally the focus, with such aspects as parents and early upbringing coming in neatly when Thomas writes a memoir of his early years for the TLS in 1913. Thomas was a depressive, sometimes suicidally so, and he was not helped by his marriage to the devoted Helen, whom he had to marry after getting her pregnant while he was an undergraduate. Two more children and a very hard living eked out of writing reviews and articles and the occasional prose book on subjects like his walks and the countryside followed. After a few chapters of this you check to see if you have wandered into a Gissing novel by mistake. For me, Thomas does not come across as a very likeable person, though he must have been because he had so many loyal friends. My sympathies were with the children and Helen, who, Hollis tells us, 'believed that Edward was entitled to his moods, even to his harrowing behaviour towards her and the children' Fortunately he was able to leave them for considerable periods, when his mood generally seemed to improve. So - trapped in a marriage about which he was ambivalent and having to provide for children whom he loved but whom he found a intolerable burden at times - Thomas was nevertheless an important part of the literary scene of the day, about which Hollis is very good - the Poetry Bookshop, Harold Monro and various quite legendary names ( it reads like the English, very non-cosmopolitan equivalent of 20s Paris, apart from Frost). Hollis is illuminating on the conflict between the Imagists and the poor old Georgians (he quotes T.S. Eliot's damning 'The Georgians caress everything they touch', and on the Dymock poets (of whom Thomas was one). But it is the friendship with Frost that is the most fascinating aspect of the book, and the way the two friends nourished each other's poetry (Thomas would surely never have switched from prose to poetry without Frost's encouragement he forged a friendship with Frost that nourished them both and helped develop Frost's ideas about 'the sound of sense' – 'the understanding that a line of verse can communicate tonally as well as through the literal definition of words'. He is most convincing on the period of agonising about whether to join up or not, the feeling of being a coward which haunted Thomas after an encounter with a gamekeeper while with Frost (and I hope everyone who still misses the irony in Frost's 'Road Not Taken' will read this book). Also his description of Thomas's life in in the army, from training in England to his time in the trenches, is psychologically astute,absolutely spot-on; that initial relief many men felt at having a purpose they did not have to agonise about, a responsibility they could deal with while having the paradoxical freedom of being told what to do, a life amongst other men, Best of all is his close reading of the poems, some of which have drafts included for our betterr understanding of Thomas's creative processes, including, inevitably, 'Adlestrop'. And he has added something to my understanding of my own favourite Thomas ' Out in the Dark', which was written during his last Christmas leave at home. Would Thomas have come home and written more poetry and been happy? Unlikely, given his temperament and what he had seen in the trenches I think. So – a gloomy book, and one which I finished with no liking for its subject,, but an essential one for the understanding of Thomas, his poetry and his place in British poetry.

  4.00 out of 5

  brunhilde

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