with him, advising and encouraging him as a poet and frequently reviewing him. He presented Davies to the public as an exciting and unusual figure, emphasizing his unique success as a contemporary writer in remaining in connection with the neglected heritage of folksong, ballads and the oral tradition. He described Davies’s work as part of ‘an old literary mode charmingly and unconsciously revived, without any sense of artifice’, and praised Davies’s drinking songs in New Poems (1907) for ‘their vigour, their truth, their splendid spirit [which] is inestimable’. It is clear that, for Thomas, Davies formed a model of the invigorating power of old songs. Davies’s poems represented the ‘vigorous impulse’ referred to in The South Country in two ways. They were a source of stimulation for further ‘vigorous’ writing by Davies or other poets, and also embodied the results of such an impulse. Thomas attributed their vigour to Davies’s refreshing and unusual lack of education and literary knowledge, writing that his poetry came from a ‘strange, vivid, unlearned, experienced’ condition and quoting G. B. Shaw’s response to Davies’s collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, as a delight in its ‘freedom from literary vulgarity … like a draught of clear water in a desert’.5
Thomas made use of the ‘vigorous impulse’ of old songs and ballads in his own mature poetry, composed several years after the discovery of Davies’s work. A considerable number of Thomas’s poems lean significantly on traditional oral sources: his two ‘Old Songs’; his three ‘Songs’, as they were entitled in the 1978 edition of his poems; the reference to traditional music in ‘The Penny Whistle’; the reinvigoration of a ballad in ‘The Ash Grove’; and the reworking of proverbs and folk tales in ‘Lob’. ‘An Old Song II’ refers directly to the practice of drawing on folk lyric. The speaker imitates the song of a robin, also represented as a shade, shadow or echo. The word ‘repeat’ refers to the refrain from the folksong around which the whole poem is built. Thus, four lines of the poem comprise a neat acknowledgement of the debt it owes to birdsong and folksong:
A robin sang, a shade in shade:
And all I did was to repeat:
‘I’ll go no more a-roving
With you, fair maid.’6
These lines also evoke Thomas’s comment to Farjeon on 2 August 1914: ‘I may as well write poetry’, beginning ‘at 36 in the shade’, thus reinforcing the reading of these lines of ‘An Old Song II’ as an allusion to his debt as a poet to ballad, song and forgotten verse ‘in the shade’.7
BEGINNING AGAIN: RETURNING TO THE OLD LORE
To make new boots from the remains of old
Oxford English Dictionary 8
The final years of the nineteenth century corresponded with the beginning of Thomas’s writing career. Linda Dowling’s Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle observes the growing doubts at this time about the imaginative life of English literary language. She connects this with nineteenth-century developments in comparative philology, referring to the ‘fin de siècle linguistic self-consciousness as it floated between the artificial dialect of literature and the “barbaric yawp” of vernacular speech’. She writes:
Spoken dialects, that is to say, not only more perfectly reflected language reality than did written languages; they also persisted in their linguistic purity, whereas written languages, already falsified by orthography, compounded their falsity by incorporating the vogue words and constructions of civilized fashion. Thus did nineteenth-century linguistic science end by fully ratifying Wordsworth’s belief in rural speech as the real language of men, and by deeply undermining Coleridge’s idea of literature and the literary dialect as a lingua communis.9
Dowling’s reference to rural speech as ‘real language’ resonates with Thomas’s preference for the spoken vernacular and oral tradition. This was clearly stated by him in September 1913, the same month he attempted his own ‘ember’ / ‘September’ poem, when he extolled the poems of one contemporary, Ralph Hodgson, for their pre-Victorian, pre-Keatsian flexibility: ‘They recall what poetry was before Keats and Tennyson had so adorned it that it could run and sing too seldom, when words were, and more often than they now are, dissolved and hidden in the beauty which they created.’10
Thomas’s reviews often show him rejecting the more embellished poetic diction of recent Victorian verse and harking back to a Wordsworthian or pre-Wordsworthian approach to language. He praised Davies for writing ‘much as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness, and felicity which makes a man think with shame how unworthily … he manages his native tongue’.11 Frost was applauded for the way in North of Boston he cast off out-worn literary conventions and ‘refused the “glory of words” which is the modern poet’s embarrassing heritage’. North of Boston was also lauded for its ‘natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.12
Thomas’s dissatisfaction with an ‘embarrassing heritage’ was shared by many writers of his time. In The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) introduction, W. B. Yeats, in a retrospective frame of mind, particularly attacked Victorianism:
The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – ‘When he should have been broken-hearted’, said Verlaine, ‘he had many reminiscences’ – the poetical eloquence of Swinburne, the psychological curiosity of Browning, and the poetic diction of everybody.
Yeats continued by describing how ‘in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts’ in a ‘reaction from rhetoric, from all that was prepense and artificial’ and from ‘what ailed Victorian literature’.13
For Thomas, getting off these stilts did not simply amount to retrogression to pre-Victorian poetic modes. In his North of Boston reviews, he took the time to distinguish Frost’s approach from Wordsworth’s. Frost ‘sympathizes where Wordsworth contemplates and the result is a unique type of eclogue, homely, racy’, moving from ‘a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity’.14 Thomas focused on the present in his celebration of Frost’s ‘colloquialism’ and leaner more contemporary diction.
Like Thomas, modernist writers in the 1913 ‘Futurism’ issue of Poetry and Drama expressed a sense of the urgent need for revolution in the use of language in poetry and literature. The opening article lays out the editors’ position: ‘[W]e claim ourselves, also, to be futurists’ and states some of ‘the first principles of our Futurism’ to be ‘[t]o lift the eyes from a sentimental contemplation of the past’ and to avoid ‘walking backwards with eyes of regret fixed on the past’.15 In the same issue, the Imagist poet F. S. Flint declared ‘Are we not really spellbound by the past, and is the Georgian Anthology really an expression of this age? I doubt it. I doubt whether English poets are really alive to what is around them.’16 Three of Thomas’s reviews, including the Hodgson review, appear in this issue of Poetry and Drama. They are grouped in a cluster that immediately follows Flint’s article. These pieces, published alongside other essays celebrating Futurism and its focus on the dynamic energy of new technology, include implicit dissatisfaction with much contemporary poetry. Hodgson’s verse is praised for its remarkable lack of ‘all weight of mere words, of undigested thought, of mechanical rhythm’.17 The saving grace of John Alford’s Poems lies in their ‘freshness [which] is that of a little before sunrise, cool and blithe and yet solemn’, suggesting a lack of such qualities in most modern poetry, and explicitly evoking a ‘kinship to Blake and some Elizabethans’.18 As in his reviews of Davies and Frost, the Poetry and Drama reviews recall a more
