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Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas Biography

Poet

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“We do not see the grey working day, the cap and gown, the note-books, the feet burning from the pavements of picture galleries, but things ' that set the spirit free for a moment,' ' stirring of the senses/ ' strange dyes,' ' strange colours and curious odours,' ' work of the artist's hands,' ' passionate attitudes.' It is not the style of ecstasy such as can be seen in Jefferies' Story of My Heart, or Sterne's Journal to Eliza, or Keats' last letter to Fanny Brawne. Hardly does it appear to be the style of remembered ecstasy as in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is free from traces of experience. All is subtilised, intellectualised, ' casting off all debris.' It is a polished cabinet of collections from history, nature, and art ; objects detached from their settings but almost never without being integrated afresh by Pater's careful arrangement, whether they are pictures, books, landscapes or personalities. It fulfils Pater's own condition of art by putting its own ' happy world ' in place of ' the meaner world of our common days.”

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Book:Walter Pater
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“The reason why Professor Earle was pleased with this Prose Diction, and why Mr. W. B. Yeats believes that 'in this century he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing,' is that men understand now the im- possibility of speaking aloud all that is within them, and if they do not speak it, they cannot write as they speak. The most they can do is to write as they would speak in a less solitary world. A man cannot say all that is in his heart to a woman or another man. The waters are too deep between us. We have not the confidence in what is within us, nor in our voices. Any man talking to the deaf or in dark- ness will leave unsaid things which he could say were he not compelled to shout, or were it light; or perhaps he will venture once — even twice— and a silence or a foolish noise prohibits him. But the silence of solitude is kindly; it allows a man to speak as if there were another in the world like himself; and in very truth, out of the multitudes, in the course of years, one or two may come, or many, who can enter that solitude and converse with him, inspired by him to confidence and articulation. Wisely did Quintilian argue against dictation, that ‘privacy is rendered impossible by it; and that a spot free from witnesses and the deepest possible silence are the most desirable for persons engaged writing, no one can doubt. You are not therefore necessarily to listen to those who think that groves and woods are the most proper places for study. ... To me, assuredly, such retirement seems rather conducive to pleasure than an incentive to literary exertion. Demosthenes acted more wisely, who secluded himself in a place where no voice could be heard, and no prospect contemplated, that his eyes might not oblige his mind to attend to anything else besides his business. As to those who study by lamplight, therefore, let the silence of the night, the closed chamber, and a single light, keep them, as it were, wholly in seclusion. . . .”

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Book:Walter Pater
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“I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more… The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone. The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”

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Author:Edward Thomas
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“The more we know of any man the more singular he will appear, and nothing so well represents his singularity as style. Literature is further divided in outward seeming from speech by what helps to make it in fact more than ever an equivalent of speech. It has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become. ' Is it wonderful,' asks Newman, after quoting Shakespeare's lines on the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling ' and * the poet's pen ' giving ' to airy nothing a local habitation and a name ': 'Is it wonderful that that pen of his should sometimes be at fault for a while — that it should pause, write, erase, re -write, amend, complete, before he satisfies himself that his language has done justice to the conceptions which his mind's eye contemplated? ‘In this point of view, doubtless, many or most writers are elaborate ; and those certainly not the least whose style is furthest removed from ornament, being simple and natural, or vehement, or severely business-like and practical. . . .”

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Book:Walter Pater
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“Above all, it is choice. Pater is at all points an eclectic. Several times he insists upon the necessity of separating what is touched with ' intense and individual power' in a man's work from what has ' almost no character at all.' In art, in life, the best of whatever kind will delight him. He loves the spectacle of 'brilliant sins and exquisite amusements.' The strong, the magnificent, the saintly, the beautiful, the cruel, the versatile, the intense, the gay, the brilliant, the weary, the sad-coloured, everything but the dull, delights him. From religion, philosophy, poetry, art, Nature, human life, he summons what is rich and strange. He delivers it in choicest language because it has to be worthy of his own choicest moments of enjoyment. For here also he is an eclectic, ignoring the ordinary, the dull, the trite.”

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Book:Walter Pater
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“Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin.”

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Author:Edward Thomas
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“To-day I think Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield, And bracken, and wild carrot's seed, And the square mustard field; Odours that rise When the spade wounds the root of tree, Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed, Rhubarb or celery; The smoke's smell, too, Flowing from where a bonfire burns The dead, the waste, the dangerous, And all to sweetness turns. It is enough To smell, to crumble the dark earth, While the robin sings over again Sad songs of Autumn mirth." - A poem called DIGGING.”

ThinkingEnoughEarthSongTurnsDarkTreeDangerousFieldsWasteRootsRoseSmellSeedsWoundsSmokeAutumnYieldSquaresScentSweetnessDiggingRobinsMirthCarrotsSpadesMustardBonfireSad SongRaspberriesCelery
Book:Selected Poems of Edward Thomas
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“The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.”

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Book:Poems of Edward Thomas
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“November’s days are thirty: November’s earth is dirty, Those thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on ground are the paths.... Few care for the mixture of earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as mud.”

MenFirstsCareEarthLastsWaterNaturePathDirtyThirtyFloodLeafsMudFeathersMixturesScornNovemberStrawsPrettiestTwigs
Book:Poems of Edward Thomas
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