Edward Thomas 1878-1917, published author, critic, and essayist, died at 39, a casualty of World War I. At the suggestion of his friend Robert Frost, Thomas began to write poetry and six months after his death his first book of poems was published. As the prose writer died, the poet was born, and it is on the poems that his reputation still rests. This new biography--based on some 1,800 of Thomas's letters--tells the story of his courtship, his restless marriage, and his tormented need to choose between happiness with his wife and children and the need to find his way as a writer alone. With delicacy and understanding the book describes Thomas's complex character and his pilgrimage on the road to self-discovery, and reveals how the emergence of Thomas the poet became inevitable.

Edward Thomas, professional author and critic, was thirty-nine when he was killed in the Arras offensive on Easter Day, 1917. Six months later his first collection of poems was published and his literary reputation secured. These Selected Letters present a uniquely vivid portrait of Thomas's life, from his time as an undergraduate at Oxford through to his final days at the Front. Chosen from more than 2,000 extant letters from Thomas to his family and literary friends - including Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Eleanor Farjeon - the selection traces his struggle to establish himself as a writer, his long and successful fight against depression, and, amid the strain of a marriage which sometimes brought much agony, the strength of his love for his wife Helen. The letters, which formed a key source for R George Thomas's highly praised biography of a poet, help substantiate the editor's belief that despite Thomas's immense prose output and the late flowering of his verse in 1914-1916, it was nevertheless the name and nature of poetry that was Edward Thomas's dominant lifelong concern.