SOURCE: Smith, Stan. “The Public Mind: Edward Thomas's Social Mysticism.” Critical Survey 11, no. 3 (1999): 67-76.

In the following essay, the author examines critical writings and poetry by Thomas to suggest that poems like Thomas's “The Other” and “Like the Touch of Rain” were influenced by the mysticism of the seventeenth-century figure, Thomas Trahane. The author argues that Thomas was struck by Traherne's “ecstasy at the sight of common things” and Traherne's notion that each individual consciousness contains all the others.

According to his biographer R. P. Eckert, Edward Thomas was unaffected by the ‘social changes that seemed to have sprung up, almost overnight, when Edward VII ascended the throne’, preferring instead the work of Thomas Traherne (1637-74), ‘of a past generation, out of place in the company of modern social theory’. Writing in 1936-7, at the height of the Popular Front, Eckert assumed that ‘modern social theory’ was a...