Anyone who edits Edward Thomas’s poems is greatly indebted to the late R. George Thomas. Among his other contributions to Thomas studies, he edited The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) [henceforth CP1978], which has a virtually comprehensive textual apparatus. If I have arrived at some different textual decisions – all differences are indicated in the Notes – it is largely R. George Thomas who marshalled the materials on which such decisions must be based. He also created the invaluable Edward Thomas Collection (Cardiff University Library), where many relevant documents are assembled. In the present edition, the textual note on each poem records its main manuscript source(s) and its initial publication(s) in book-form (including pamphlets and anthologies). Other sources and printings are cited where necessary. Details of manuscripts, typescripts and publications of poems are given in Abbreviations (325).
In 1917, shortly before Thomas’s death, he published eighteen poems in An Annual of New Poetry [AANP] under his pseudonym ‘Edward Eastaway’ (Eastaway was a family name). Poems by Edward Eastaway [P] appeared posthumously in the same year. P contains sixty-four poems, none repeated from AANP. Last Poems by Edward Thomas [LP] was published in 1918. LP contains all but seven of Thomas’s remaining poems. The first Collected Poems by Edward Thomas [CP1920] added ‘Up in the Wind’. The second Collected Poems [CP1928] added four more poems. Transferred to Faber and Faber in 1936, the Collected Poems later appeared in a new edition [CP1944], which remained the significant text for many years. Its fifth impression [CP1949] added one more poem, as did CP1978. The current Faber Collected Poems [CP2004] takes its text from CP1978, but treats the titles of poems differently (see below). CP2004 does not reprint any textual apparatus, although, rather confusingly, it retains the textual aspect of R. George Thomas’s Introduction to CP1978.
Thomas oversaw the publication of his poems in AANP and P. This edition thus regards these texts as authoritative, except for a few instances discussed in the Notes. CP1978 departs more frequently from P, mainly owing to ‘doubts’ about how its text was assembled (see CP1978, 38). Such doubts would have been dispelled by the printer’s typescript of P [PTP], which clearly passed through Thomas’s hands. But PTP did not become known to R. George Thomas until the paperback edition of CP1978 (without its apparatus) had gone to press in 1981. Among other textual consequences, since no changes were subsequently made, this affects the titles of certain poems in CP1978, and still in CP2004.
Often when Thomas wrote a poem, he did not immediately give it a title. That can be gauged from the manuscript notebooks, now in the British Library [BL] and the Bodleian [B], in which he made fair (more or less) copies of nearly all his poems. In PTP twenty-three titles in Thomas’s handwriting are added to typescript poems (Eleanor Farjeon was his principal typist). Apart from ‘The Trumpet’ and ‘The Gallows’, these are first-line titles, e.g., ‘Bright Clouds’, ‘Women he liked’, ‘How at once’, and ‘Gone, gone again’. Thus R. George Thomas should not have named those poems and ‘Like the touch of rain’ (where the title is typed) from references in Thomas’s letters. His new titles are: ‘The Pond’, ‘Bob’s Lane’, ‘The Swifts’, ‘Blenheim Oranges’, and ‘“Go now”’. Such references are, surely, a form of shorthand. Similarly, he turns Thomas’s mention of ‘the household poems’ into an overarching title for the sequence beginning ‘If I should ever by chance’. In PTP Thomas gives these four poems first-line titles. R. George Thomas also attaches the generic title ‘Song’ to the poems named by Thomas in PTP as ‘The clouds that are so light’ and ‘Early one morning’. Finally, in addition to the evidence of PTP, a letter from Thomas to his wife (20 October 1916) shows him to be up to speed with ‘the set [of verses] Ingpen has’ (SL, 133). Roger Ingpen, then at Selwyn & Blount, saw P through the press.
As regards LP (apart from the poems already printed in AANP) and six of the poems later added to Collected Poems, titles and other textual issues become more difficult. It appears that the LP editors, presumably literary friends of Thomas’s, adopted two procedures with formerly un-named poems. First, they gave them first-line titles (‘She dotes’, ‘I built myself a house of glass’, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, ‘Those things that poets said’, ‘I never saw that land before’, ‘No one cares less than I’, ‘There was a time’, ‘That girl’s clear eyes’, ‘What will they do?’, ‘Out in the dark’). Second, they named poems for a central image or motif (‘Over the Hills’, ‘Man and Dog’, ‘The Gypsy’, ‘Ambition’, ‘The Wasp Trap’, ‘Digging’ [‘Today I think’], ‘Health’, ‘A Cat’, ‘The Dark Forest’, ‘The Child in the Orchard’). At the same time, as with other aspects of the LP text, it should be remembered that the editors may have consulted papers, or had information, no longer extant. In CP1978 R. George Thomas brackets all the above titles as questionable. I have indicated where he does so, and also where CP2004 (on no clear basis) has either dropped the titles completely or, in five instances, dropped the brackets instead. This edition retains the LP titles, together with the titles first given as ‘The Lane’ and ‘The Watchers’ in Two Poems (1927) [TP], and as ‘No one so much as you’ and ‘The Wind’s Song’ in CP1928. The poem for Thomas’s father, included in CP1949 as ‘P.H.T.’, has here been named for its first line (‘I may come near loving you’); as has his last poem, ‘The sorrow of true love’, first printed in CP1978.
There are several arguments for retaining titles that cannot confidently be traced to Thomas. First: nearly half (eleven) are first-line titles. The ms. titles added to PTP, like some titles already in place, show that the first-line title was his default-setting. (Hence ‘I may come near loving you’ and ‘The sorrow of true love’ in this edition.) Second: P, AANP, and the few poems printed elsewhere during his lifetime prove that Thomas came up with titles when publication loomed. Thus, even if ‘To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails’ (‘Women he liked’), he was no purist who feared that a title might limit a poem’s suggestiveness. Third: both established usage and convenience of reference should count for something. Certain poems by Thomas have been long known and discussed under particular titles. Such familiarity was controversially upset by CP1978; more so by CP2004, where poems are identified by their first lines in the Contents list, but only have a number on the page. This is awkward both for reading and for reference. The most problematic cases, then, are established titles which are not first-line titles, and whose provenance is uncertain (see previous paragraph). If editors bestowed those titles, perhaps they felt either that a first-line title would not work (as in the case of ‘Man and Dog’), or that an obvious title beckoned. Some of their apparent choices may be slightly more open to question than others. But, with the possible exception of ‘Over the Hills’, none obtrudes as inappropriate.
Like other poets killed in the First World War, Edward Thomas bequeathed a degree of textual uncertainty to his editors. Editors of the Collected Poems before CP1978 occasionally make changes from P and LP (changes that usually reflect BL or B), but without indicating their authority for doing so. Here and there they also standardise punctuation, adding exclamation-marks, for instance. This edition follows CP1978 in altering ‘to-day’ to ‘today’ etc. A difficulty for all editors is that at times Thomas revised poems, and then (as in the case of ‘Sedge-Warblers’) seemingly rejected the revision. In the absence of clear evidence as to his final preferences, the ear must play a part in weighing the balance of probability. Since some issues will always remain undecidable, the Notes provide a basis for readers to make up their own minds. A conspicuous way in which this edition (like CP1978, CP2004, and my own earlier edition of P and LP [1973]) departs from Thomas’s own schemes is by ordering his poems chronologically. Evidently, he could never have conceived such a Collected Poems, any more than a collection called Last Poems. One drawback is that chronological editions must sacrifice the sequencing of poems in P, although Thomas had to omit the AANP poems from P itself. But, given the tight time-frame of Thomas’s poetry – as if he set out to write his collected poems in one go – it may be well served by a chronological arrangement.