SOURCE: Bromwich, David. “Edward Thomas and Modernism.” In Raritan Reading, edited by Richard Poirier, pp. 26-46. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Bromwich uses Edward Thomas's literary criticism of early modernists such as Ezra Pound and his rejection of the Symbolist movement, along with his friendship with Robert Frost, to explain how Thomas developed his own literary style, as evidenced in the poems “Tall Nettles,” “Liberty,” and “Blenheim Oranges.” The essay also contains an amusing anecdote about Thomas's misreading of Frost's poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

In any discussion of modern poetry Edward Thomas is apt to be praised in a subordinate clause; if the speaker has mastered the tone of patronage appropriate to a survey, the clause may well be: “though an interesting secondary figure, Thomas. … “Interesting in this case admits the integrity of a style which though never consciously modernist still...