Edward Thomas

Philip Edward Thomas was born on 3 March 1878 in Lambeth, south London, the son of Philip Henry Thomas, a civil servant, author, preacher and local politician, and Mary Elizabeth Townsend. The family was mostly Welsh. He was educated in London, at schools including St Paul's, and became a history scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1899, while still an undergraduate, he married Helen Noble and decided to live by his pen.

He reviewed up to 15 books a week, wrote criticism for the Daily Chronicle, and produced biographies and books about the countryside. In 1906 the family moved to Steep in East Hampshire, and there, at the end of 1914, he began to write poetry. The American poet Robert Frost in particular encouraged him, and Frost's "The Road Not Taken" was inspired by their walks together.

Thomas's poems are written in a colloquial style and often turn to the English countryside. "Adlestrop" was written after his train made a stop at the Cotswolds station of that name on 24 June 1914. He first published poems under the name Edward Eastaway, in Six Poems (1916); Poems followed in 1917 and Collected Poems in 1920. The Poems of Edward Thomas on this site brings his verse together.

Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, although as a mature married man he could have avoided it. Commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916, he was killed in action at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. Ted Hughes called him "the father of us all".

Sources: wikipedia.org