SOURCE: Longley, Edna. “The Business of the Earth: Edward Thomas and Ecocentrism.” In High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939, edited by Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, pp. 107-29. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Longley argues that Thomas's poetry destabilizes authority, perception, and time in a way that is foreign to modernist aesthetics. Relying on theories by Raymond Williams and Robyn Eckerley, the author provides close readings of three Thomas poems entitled “Home” to demonstrate that Thomas's poetry fuses ecological and environmental concerns with local or regional concerns.

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Modernism and Marxism fetishize the city, but in different ways. The one neglects “nature poetry” as having refused a cognitive and aesthetic revolution; the other criticizes “pastoral” as repressing the exploitation not only of urban workers in the present but of rural workers in the past. For example, the unreal city of...