CREATIVE READING: WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS

Event information

It was only in the last couple of years of a life cut short by the First World War that Edward Thomas wrote the 144 poems that secured his place as one of the most important and best-loved poets of the twentieth century. Even if you don’t normally write poetry, this session may inspire you to do so; and fiction writers, particularly those interested in the Chekhovian (‘slice of life’) short story, will find it helpful to think about the ways in which Thomas’s poetry, so often representing experience as uncertain or indeterminate, can help us to free ourselves into a more open style of writing.

Poems likely to be discussed are ‘Old Man’, ‘Adlestrop’, ‘Swedes’, ‘The Unknown Bird’, ‘Ambition’, ‘The Owl’, ‘But these things also’, ‘The Glory’, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, ‘Rain’, ‘Tall Nettles’, ‘February Afternoon’ and ‘As the team’s head-brass’. You can find Thomas’s poems online here:
https://archive.org/details/collectedpoems00thomrich/page/n9/mode/2up
(If you want to buy, Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems, superbly edited by Edna Longley, is a bargain at £12.)

PLEASE NOTE TIMES ARE GMT.