of James, Freud and Coleridge, and experiments conducted by Gertrude Stein. The distancing of the writer from works in progress that occurs as a result of readers’ feedback on drafts and completed poems, and the effects on the poem of a focus that tracks the present moment and immediate physical sensations are also discussed.
The eighth and concluding chapter argues for the importance of a sustained, open and exact attention to immediate perceptions and thoughts when composing. Making reference to James, Freud and Woolf and to Japanese aesthetics, Thomas’s development of the art of ‘divagations’, perfected by him in his poetic work, is examined, as is the way his poetry, controlled but flexible, resists conclusions, and so succeeds, even in its completed forms, to remain in process. This chapter also refers to Thomas’s use of enveloping perspectives and concludes with a discussion of the lack of conclusiveness in his writing, confirming his special position and importance as a poet of the composing process.
Although the focus in this book remains on Thomas, much of what is said applies to other poets and artists. The epigraphs prefacing each section of the book encourage such readings. Some show Thomas approaching the subject from unexpected angles. Others shift the focus to poets from different times and contexts and artists in varying creative disciplines, suggesting, intentionally, that elements of Thomas’s composition processes identified and isolated here apply also to musicians, artists, thinkers, dictionary-makers.
We are all creators.
Judy Kendall
Salford Quays
Starting Points – How Poems Emerge
that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.
Russell Hoban1
Much of Thomas’s life was spent not writing poetry. From 1897 to 1913, he produced extensive criticism on poetry and poetic prose but practically no poems. His mature poems surfaced only in his last two years. Poised, for several years, at the brink of poetic composition, his writing career is like an analogy, writ large, of the process of composing a poem. Andrew Motion notes of the development of Thomas’s prose writing style: ‘With hindsight it is obvious that he was clearing the ground for his poems.’2
As a result, an obvious place to start observing Thomas’s poetic process is the point at which a poem emerged in his awareness. The importance this initial phase in poetic composition held for him is suggested in his continued exploration, in his criticism, prose books and poetry, of the beginnings of articulation. However, it is possible that he took so long to embark on his later poetry, as opposed to his early juvenilia, because his poetic composing processes began prior to that point of awareness. Perhaps a protracted composing process, leaving little visible trace, was long underway before the poem appeared in his mind and on the page. Investigation of the external conditions in which his composing processes took place is necessary to establish whether such conditions were a contributing factor.
The unusually large proportion of critical biographies in Thomas’s critical heritage demonstrate scholarly recognition of the importance external conditions held for Thomas. These works make several connections between his writing and life, including the outburst of poetry in his late thirties and the onset of the First World War, and, more proleptically, his impending death in that war. The implication is that foreknowledge of this fate spurred him on to write his lyrics, a suggestion a number of his poems appear to confirm.
Similarly, the context in which Thomas wrote seems, like his writing career, to act as an analogy for the emergence of a poem. Thomas published his writings from 1895 to 1917, a period of rapid urbanization leading up to the First World War, and on the cusp between the grand traditions of the Romantics and the Victorians, and modernist experimentation. This was a period also of revolution in fine arts; in linguistics and philology; in studies of the mind in psychology and in the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis. Language itself was under severe scrutiny, evident in Oscar Wilde’s earlier experiments with the spoken voice; the Georgian poets’ attempts to revitalize poetic language; the multiple manifestos on poetic writing produced by the various movements of the Imagists, Vorticists and Futurists; and the keen interest shown by poets of this time in Japanese literary aesthetics. Japanese aesthetics were an important influence on the creative work of W.B. Yeats; Thomas’s close friend and collaborator, Gordon Bottomley; and the Imagist poets. Thomas, the major critic of contemporary poetry of his day and reviewer of most of these writers, also wrote about Japanese writers and showed himself keenly aware of Japanese aesthetics.
Just as a poem before it emerges may hover on the cusp of articulated form and structure, so Thomas himself was on the peripheries of, but not fully allied to, the literary movements of his time. He was closely connected with writers in Edward Marsh’s Georgian anthologies, particularly Bottomley and Walter de la Mare, exchanging criticism and ideas on writing with them. However, his work never appeared in these anthologies and he remained to some extent critical of them. Similarly, his opinion of early modernist work was muted, although features of his writing very much anticipated later modernist writings and, in particular, strong parallels exist between his work and Virginia Woolf’s later writings. Julia Briggs observes how Woolf’s later work is like Thomas’s writing in its revelation of ‘disruption quite as much as continuity’.3 Thomas, therefore, mirrored the conflicts of his time, as Edna Longley recognizes, calling him a ‘radical continuator’ who stands ‘“on a strange bridge alone” (‘The Bridge’) between Romantics and Moderns’.4
This image of a man on a bridge is typical of Thomas. The speakers of his poems express and inhabit indecision and indeterminacy. D. J. Enright calls the slippery syntax of his poetry ‘unamenable to high-level exegesis’.5 Other Thomas scholars emphasize the lacunae, contradictions and ambiguities in his writing. John Lucas refers to the ‘carefully weighed qualification of utterance – the brooding hesitancies that are unique to Thomas’s mode of spoken verse’.6 These qualities reflect crucial elements in the composition process, re-enacted by Thomas in his poetic work, which itself remains in some sense in process, cut short by his early death.
IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: NOTES FROM THE ENVIRONMENT
the water over green rock & purple weed in a cove near Zennor where I bathed & the little circle of upright stones at Boscawen Inn
Edward Thomas7
Analysis of the context in which Thomas is writing or not writing his poetry is most easily quantifiable as the physical environment. This is most evident in the note-taking that preceded his prose writing. These notes recorded impressions of his immediate physical environment that were later worked into creative pieces.
He showed concern that this reliance on notes was affecting his writing processes detrimentally, writing to de la Mare on 9 October 1909:
There may be excuses for inconclusiveness but not for negligence. I didn’t realise, till I saw these in print, what a hurry I had been in. Probably at the back of it all is my notebook habit. Either I must overcome that or I must write much more laboriously – not mix the methods of more or less intuitive writing & of slaving adding bits of colour and so on. Bottomley sternly advises me to burn my notebooks & buy no more.8
In ‘How I Began’, Thomas recorded how this ‘notebook habit’ reached back to his childhood:
At that age [eight or nine] I was given a
