All You Need Is Love? Edward Thomas, Apostrophizing the Other

Abstract

This chapter presents a close reading of specific Thomas poems, while arguing for the necessity of close reading. Much close reading has been sacrificed in the critical drive to historicity and a ‘relevant’ contextualization of literary work. However, poetry demands attention to the singular, in a response to the other that is the voice of the poem. The poem is the trace of a ghost that returns in the act of reading to call the subject who reads. Taking the problem of Thomas as it has been understood in criticism as a starting point, I turn the focus of the reading of the poet back to the text as text. Examining in particular two poems, ‘Celandine’ and ‘The Unknown’, but also taking in various of his ‘nature’ poems, which are, I would argue, in a direct line from Hardy’s poetic work in the representation of the English landscape, I explore the relationship between the past, memory, love, the other, and place. For Thomas, the other is always spectral, always a revenant, and it is only through a close reading that the other comes back, not only to be understood, but to be seen, and felt, as well as heard.