Although little is known about Richard Thoma's early life, he was fairly well-known in Paris as a poet and editor by the time Peter Neagoe included an essay by Thoma in Americans Abroad An Anthology in 1932. In 1930 Thoma, Samuel Putnam, and Harold J. Salemson had signed "Direction," a manifesto responding to transition magazine editor Eugene Jolas's "Revolution of the Word Proclamation," which called for a radical restructuring of the written word. For the next two years, as an associate editor of Putnam's New Review, he was involved in much of the New Review 's warfare against Edward Titus's conservative This Quarter on the one hand, and Jolas's avant-garde transition on the other. Thoma's poems are rather formal in style, yet some are relentlessly homosexual in subject. His obscurity is in part due to the unavailability of his books, all of which were published in limited editions.

Poems included...