In his poetry Thomas has the ability to stop me and experience the scene, and the feeling it evokes in me even if I don’t fully understand the words. It’s soul food produced by a man whose own soul was often vastly troubled.
Yes! Definitely a troubled man, and you feel that's part of what drives him to write that way. The Matthew Hollis biography really gives you a sense of that.
Thomas's poetry, I suppose, is part of that rich treasury of English literature about a golden pastoral past whose passing the Great War marked. It wouldn't be correct to say the war ended it. Society changed, the world changed, attitudes and expectations changed, and it's hard to decide which were good changes and which were the wrong turns. What's certain though, these moments of peace and stillness, when there was still countryside and people who loved it, have gone forever, and I for one think that is worth writing poetry about.
Yeah I think that's a good way to look at it, that the thing Thomas transitions between is not just the War. I think you see it in Hardy too. I agree that there's something in his work that feels as though it's from a lost time.
I wonder how many of the people who lived into the twenties, the land fit for heroes, then the depression saw accelerated capitalism as the problem rather than the war. I suspect the general view would have been, it was better before the filthy Hun type of thing
Well yes, I guess it would've been like it is now, where the central project of most of our political culture seems to be to distract us from seeing accelerated capitalism as the problem!
In his poetry Thomas has the ability to stop me and experience the scene, and the feeling it evokes in me even if I don’t fully understand the words. It’s soul food produced by a man whose own soul was often vastly troubled.
Yes! Definitely a troubled man, and you feel that's part of what drives him to write that way. The Matthew Hollis biography really gives you a sense of that.
I love that biography. I’ve heard Hollis talking about him to, maybe on YouTube?
Thomas's poetry, I suppose, is part of that rich treasury of English literature about a golden pastoral past whose passing the Great War marked. It wouldn't be correct to say the war ended it. Society changed, the world changed, attitudes and expectations changed, and it's hard to decide which were good changes and which were the wrong turns. What's certain though, these moments of peace and stillness, when there was still countryside and people who loved it, have gone forever, and I for one think that is worth writing poetry about.
Yeah I think that's a good way to look at it, that the thing Thomas transitions between is not just the War. I think you see it in Hardy too. I agree that there's something in his work that feels as though it's from a lost time.
I wonder how many of the people who lived into the twenties, the land fit for heroes, then the depression saw accelerated capitalism as the problem rather than the war. I suspect the general view would have been, it was better before the filthy Hun type of thing
Well yes, I guess it would've been like it is now, where the central project of most of our political culture seems to be to distract us from seeing accelerated capitalism as the problem!