Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas [Kindle Edition]

Hollis' book is a marvelous achievement. I have admired Thomas' poetry for years but knew remarkably little about the man beyond his literary reputation, his war-service and his background in reviewing and 'nature' writing. This book presents us with an often unsympathetic figure, largely because of his troubled family-life where he often seems surly, irascible, even psychologically brutal with his wife and children. (His struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide are sympathetically treated, but Hollis does not shy away from the awful impact his moods must have had on those closest to him. This can make for disturbing reading!) Yet Hollis explores his writing wonderfully, brilliantly contextualising it in the literary culture of the period. The Georgians, the Poetry Bookshop, The Dymock Poets, Pound, Yeats, Rupert Brooke, WH Davis and many others move in and out of focus as the narrative progresses and are fascinating in themselves. However, the key interest must be Thomas's initially hesitant movement from increasingly 'jobbing' prose to poetry. What an extraordinary burst of creativity in his last couple of years! Robert Frost's place in Thomas's life is thoroughly explored and emerges as the great formative friendship, the midwife to Thomas's emergence as a poet of great importance.

Hollis writes beautifully, with the right balance of sensitive analysis when considering the poems (this is NOT, thankfully a text book approach to the work) and he is always sympathetic, though not blinkered, about his subject. By the end, I felt I understood the work far more, albeit at the cost of admiring Thomas the man a good deal less. And another caveat is the rather brusque rendering of Thomas's last days, though one could argue the very brevity of the account paradoxically emphasises the terrible randomness and ubiquity of such deaths.

The Kindle edition is well-formatted and the illustrations are fully accessible: the maps are rather less so. For Kindle readers, I would also recommend The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, which seems to be without the frequent glitches and proof reading howlers of so many cheap Kindle poetry collections.

This is a wonderful book and all the more remarkable for being the author's first work of non-fiction. It should be read by everyone who is interested in Edward Thomas, poetry and everyone else. Matthew Hollis has written the most plausible account yet of the last four years of ET's troubled existence. All previous attempts have been written by people who were too in love with him, too close to his family or too polite to provide a sufficiently objective account. As he valued honesty (read "I may come near loving you" for proof) above everything, ET would surely approve.
The big mystery about ET is why after so many years of reviewing and writing prose he turned to poetry. The book focuses on Robert Frost's role but goes much further than any previous writer in showing why Frost's influence was the trigger rather than the underlying cause. The truth is surely that ET had to write poetry. It was either that or "the friend" in his pocket. By 1914 his regular sources of income were drying up, the war seemed likely to determine the fates of all, the "melancholy" he had wrestled with all of his adult life had not departed, so why not have a go? He told Eleanor Farjeon "I couldn't write a poem to save my life." - how wrong can you be?
The other mystery is why he joined up. He wasn't jingoistic (see "This is no case of petty right or wrong") and he was old enough not to feel under any great pressure to go. So why did he do it? Read the book! If you're still not convinced read the poems, particularly; Aspens, Sowing, Beauty, Lob, The Owl, Light's Out, For These and Old Man and then, I promise you will want to!

A wonderful achievement from this first time biographer. Perhaps Matthew Hollis' own career as a poet gives him a particular sense of Thomas' work and of his frustrated hopes and melancholy.
This is an evocative account of the man and his circle (including the Dymock poets) and the way in which creative relationships are part of the making of a writer. It is also beautifully, yet not affectedly, written and leaves a reader with a broader sense of the world of pre-war literary Britain.
i understood much more about the subsequent history of Thomas' reputation having read Hollis' book, and I was sorry to finish it but sadder that Thomas' strange wartime death in the snow at Arras in 1917 brought his mid life blossoming to an end.