Nature's Poet

- Anna Stenning

Edward Thomas is often remembered as a war poet, and for the sadness that afflicted him for much of his life. Yet his writing is often  concerned with the happiness he found in nature and rural places. His countryside books and poetry display an almost religious devotion to the life of the fields and hedgerows.

Born to Welsh parents, Thomas had a happy-go-lucky childhood in a house full of boys and animals, folk song and Arthurian legends. His home was in Victorian Wandsworth, southwest London, yet at a young age he became enthralled by the writings of Richard Jefferies, a squire’s son from Wiltshire, who wrote about hunting, fishing, wildlife and country people.

On the edges of London, the young Thomas began to explore nature, and visited family in the countryside around Swindon, Glamorgan and west Wales. These experiences were the origin of Thomas’s first collection of countryside essays, The Woodland Life, published in 1897, when Thomas was 19 years old.