This book offers still more insight into the highly influential writer and poet Edward Thomas through his correspondence with Walter de la Mare: 318 letters from between 1906 and 1917, of which only three have been previously published. They are presented in an accessible, enjoyable but scholarly volume. The letters provide new and crucial evidence about Thomas's poetic processes and the start of his mature poetry. They also show the mutual support the two poets enjoyed; and give new information on the closeness of the Thomas and de la Mare families. They include some beautiful natural descriptions and track Thomas's progress as a reviewer and writer. The physical spacing in the letters provides evidence of often hurried and tired writing but also of a sensitivity to what is not said, to pauses, to rhythm, which prefigure his poems. His idiosyncratic handwriting also underlines key ideas about poetic composition and illuminates his understanding of his journey from prose writer to poet - topics of great interest to Thomas scholars. Poet to Poet offers a moving epistolary account of the developing personal and poetic relationship of both poets, with biographical revelations, and increased understanding of their influence on each other and key points relating to their poetic processes. The letters are arranged chronologically, and are divided into three sections which illuminate Thomas and De la Mare's relationship: 1906-09 The Reviewer and the Poet; 1910-13 Two Writers; 1913-17 Two Poets. Each section has a short introduction highlighting general points of interest and change in their epistolary relationship. The book includes a transcriptor's preface, brief biographical information on the two poets, suggestions for further reading and an index. The Introduction highlights essential points from the letters, in particular revelations about both poets' writing processes, how Thomas's criticism of De la Mare's verse informs his own, information on their relationship and details of de la Mare's character.

How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.

Edward Thomas: The Origins of his Poetry builds a new theoretical framework for critical work on imaginative composition through an investigation of Edward Thomas's composing processes, on material from his letters, his poems and his prose books. It looks at his relation to the land and landscape and includes detailed and illuminating new readings of his poems and close study of many of his hitherto relatively neglected prose works. It traces new and surprising connections between Thomas's approach to composition and the writing and thought of Freud, Woolf and William James, and introduces the significant influence of Japanese aesthetics on Thomas. Analysis of his drafts, layout and typographic and handwritten habits also illumine both his completed poetry and his approach to composition. The sustained study of some of Thomas's voluminous correspondence with fellow poets and writers helps also to provide an epistolary reading of his work. The result is not only an ambitious, detailed original consideration of Thomas as writer of poetry and prose but also a surprising and far-reaching analysis of poetic composition with wide-reaching implications for early twentieth-century aesthetic theory, and the limits or the conditions of the sayable, and, through the subtle use of epigraphs from a wide-range of differing sources, the location of the specific readings of Thomas in a much wider intellectual context .