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This early work by Edward Thomas was originally published in 1909 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The South Country' is one of Thomas's works on the subject of nature. Philip Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, England in 1878. His parents were Welsh migrants, and Thomas attended several schools, before ending up at St. Pauls. Thomas led a reclusive early life, and began writing as a teenager. He published his first book, The Woodland Life (1897), at the age of just nineteen. A year later, he won a history scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford. Despite being less well-known than other World War I poets, Thomas is regarded by many critics as one of the finest.
Spring was late in 1913 and Edward Thomas decided to go and search for winter's grave and the tell-tale signs of season's turn - he set out to cycle westwards from London to the Quantocks. Edward Thomas 1878-1917 turned from writing prose to poetry in 1914. His work as a poet has been widely celebrated and admired - Ted Hughes described Thomas as "the father of us all". The Pursuit of Spring, originally published in 1914, bridges the divide between Thomas the journalist/critic and Thomas the highly regarded poet.
Whilst out walking one day in the shade at the age of thirty-six, with the First World War looming, Edward Thomas decided to become a poet. In the few years that followed, believing he belonged nowhere, he tramped across rolling chalk downland, stitching himself to the landscape. Gently slanting from the door of his stone cottage, the South Downs – a range of chalk hills that extend across the southeastern coastal counties of England from Hampshire in the west to Sussex in the east – became day by day the mainspring of his poetry. As a perennial poet and essayist of the South Downs, Edward Thomas remains an enduring presence a century later in the downland he trampled daily, treading and documenting a series of paths around the village of Steep, East Hampshire, where he lived until enlisting. Arranging itself around a number of journeys in pursuit of the early twentieth century poet and nature writer, this book provides a personal and moving tale of encountering literature in landscape, retreading Edward Thomas’s footprints from the beginning of his epically creative final four years, to the site where he died in 1917, during the Battle of Arras.
Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be seen as one of the great English poets of the 20th century. Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon as a "war poet," he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war. His main subjects were the English countryside and people, solitude, and the anguish of solipsism. As de la Mare wrote eighty years ago, "When Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no other where than in these poems." This complete collection of Thomas's poems retur...
More than 2,500 merchant ships and auxiliaries were sunk during the war, by far the greatest majority by U boats. This volume contains the names of all who died serving in the merchant marine and in auxiliaries, armed merchant cruisers, hospital ships etc with the date of death. In each case the name of the ship is given and the individual's function on board, such as master, mate, stewardess, greaser, trimmer, fireman, lascar etc.
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