Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is best known as one of the great poets of the First World War. But there is another memorial to him: The Literary Pilgrim in England first published in 1917 is his finest prose work and has now become a classic. "The book takes the reader on a journey along the highways and byways of literature," says Michael Justin Davis in his introduction. With Edward Thomas as our guide we go in search of the homes and landscapes of some of our most famous writers. Shelley is seen eating "hard eggs and radishes and rolls at Eton"; Tennyson's starling "claps his tiny castanets" across the rectory garden in Lincolnshire; Blake's chimney-sweeper's cry is heard echoing through the streets of London; Emily Bronte runs across "my dear moorland" in Yorkshire; Gilbert White sows his kidney beans in the lower field garden at Selborne; and Burns walks forth "to view the corn an' snuff the caller air" outside England in the Western Lowlands of Scotland. Among the many other famous writers included are Keats, Aubrey, Cobbett, Hardy, Belloc, Coleridge, Clare and Wordsworth. The original edition is now illustrated with portraits, engravings and paintings directly related to the text. The specially commissioned photographs by Simon McBride show the landscape and the places as they are now in all their beauty and subtlety. - Jacket flap.

Twenty-four short stories set in the English countryside, which give new interpretations of the origins of such well-known proverbial sayings as "Never say die" and "Look before you leap."

Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as a 'war poet', he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war, and whose main subjects were the English countryside and its people, and the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.