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Letters To Helen

Edward Thomas

Edited by R. George Thomas

Cover Picture of Letters To Helen
Categories: War writings
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Letters to Helen, edited from original manuscripts held in libraries in Aberystwyth and Cardiff, includes forty of the more than one thousand letters which the poet Edward Thomas sent to his wife Helen. Their relationship, vividly recounted in Under Storm's Wing which incorporates Helen's memoirs and their daughter Myfanwy's recollections, is one of the legendary romances of the century, tragically cut short by the poet's death in France in 1917.

    Helen and Edward were together for twenty-one years. These letters evoke in their style and candour as much as in what they describe and discuss, a provincial and settled world of books and nature, with the hardships that love weathered, and the change that came in 1915.

    For the first time these letters have been edited together and in full, providing a moving, unposed narrative portrait of one of our finest rural poets, a man who came to writing poems late and tentatively, encouraged by Robert Frost. They include fascinating documents of the couple's friendships with D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney and other writers of the day.

    Thomas' early letters to Harry and Jane Hooton complete this rich collection.
    Edward Thomas
    Edward Thomas was born in London in 1878 and was educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College Oxford. He published his first book, a collection of essays on the country, in 1896, with the encouragement of the critic James Ashcroft Noble. In 1899, while he was still an undergraduate, Thomas ... read more
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