Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Thomas, Philip Edward
THOMAS, PHILIP EDWARD (1878–1917), critic and poet, born in Lambeth 3 March 1878, the eldest son of Philip Henry Thomas, staff clerk for light railways and tramways at the Board of Trade, by his wife, Mary Elizabeth, daughter of Edward Thomas Townsend, of Newport, Monmouthshire, was of pure Welsh descent on the paternal, and of Welsh and Spanish blood on the maternal side. He was educated at St. Paul's School, and matriculated at Oxford as a non-collegiate student in 1897, but in the following year was elected to a scholarship in modern history at Lincoln College. He gained a second class in that subject in 1900, and graduated B.A. in the same year. Thomas early showed a passion both for nature and for literature, his favourite authors being Richard Jefferies, Izaak Walton, and Malory. His first book, The Woodland Life, appeared in 1897. Two years later he married Helen, daughter of James Ashcroft Noble, the critic, who had encouraged him to write. Thomas settled at Bearsted, Kent, in 1901, moving to The Weald, Sevenoaks, in 1903, and to Petersfield in 1908, maintaining himself by reviewing, and by critical essays and studies of country life. Frequent excursions through the southern counties gave him intimate knowledge and love of rural life and scenery, and his book Richard Jefferies, His Life and Work (1909) is racy of the soil of Wiltshire, its character, history, and farm life. The little group of imaginative masterpieces, such as ‘Home’, ‘July’, ‘The Flower Gatherer’, ‘Olwen’, ‘A Group of Statuary’, in Rest and Unrest (1910) and Light and Twilight (1911), excel by clear beauty of imagery, grace of contour, and delicate, limpid English. ‘Celtic magic’ and a sensitive freshness and contemplative charm inspire these idylls as well as many pages of The South Country (1909), and In Pursuit of Spring (1914). The range of Thomas's cool, fastidious, critical taste, and of his subtle destructive analysis, is shown in his studies of Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913).
The incessant strain of literary journalism and of producing book after book for publishers, ‘paid at one pound per thousand words’, without respite or hope of popular success, had told seriously on Thomas's health by 1911, and with his deepening anxieties in the next two years his tendency to introspective melancholy steadily increased. The War solved his difficulties. In July 1915 he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles, but was transferred to the Royal Garrison Artillery. He went to France in 1917, and was killed at Arras on 9 April of that year.
Six months before joining the army, Thomas, inspired by the example of his friend Robert Frost, the American poet, bent all his energies to writing verse. In his foreword to The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (1920), Walter De La Mare has said: ‘This intensity of solitude, this impassioned, almost trance-like delight in things natural, simple, short-lived and happy seeming, “lovely of motion, shape and line”, is expressed—even when the clouds of melancholy and of self-distrust lour darkest—on every page of this book. A light shines in it, like that of “cowslips wet with the dew of their birth”. If one word could tell of his all, that word would be England. … When indeed Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered, of so true and pure a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection can be found in no other than in these poems …’
Sensitive and shy, Thomas guarded himself from the world by a fine, dry irony, which slightly veiled the poet both austere and ardent in his passion for beauty and the homely things of earth. His lofty, melancholy spirit burned in an eye fastidiously grave. His figure was tall and spare, his hair at thirty was bleached gold, his head noble. He left one son and two daughters. Among his personal friends were W. H. Hudson, Walter De La Mare, W. H. Davies, and Edward Garnett.
[W. De La Mare, Foreword to The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, 1920; E. Garnett, Some Letters of Edward Thomas, in the Athenæum, 16 and 23 April, 1920.]