Edward Thomas and the Georgians

Leavis was wrong about Edward Thomas. This judgment was put to me during a typically uneasy supervision with an eminent scholar. Leavis had used Thomas in the second chapter of New Bearings to announce the shift from a Victorian to a Modem point of view. In Thomas we had a poet who could not be associated with the Georgians, whom Leavis viewed as backward-looking. Thomas, it was argued, was 'a very original poet who devoted great technical subtlety to the expression of a distinctively modern sensibility.' The specific comparison Leavis suggested was with Hardy. The latter, according to Leavis in 1932, 'is now seen to be truly a Victorian—a Victorian in his very pessimism, which implies positives and assurances that have vanished. He inhabits a solid world, with the earth firm under his feet.' Thomas, by contrast, is concerned with 'the finer texture of living, the here and now, the ordinary moments, in which for him the 'meaning' (if any) resides. It is as if he were trying to catch some shy intuition on the edge of consciousness that would disappear if looked at directly.' Hardy had not 'impinged' upon the poetic situation of his day, Leavis argued, because 'the stresses incident to the most sensitive and aware had shifted and altered' from those which Hardy records to those by which Thomas gave voice to 'the modern disintegration, the sense of directionlessness.' Thus Thomas was said to be 'exquisitely sincere and sensitive, and ... succeeded in expressing in poetry a representative modern sensibility.' It was with respect to this, Thomas's modernity, that my supervisor disagreed with Leavis. As far as he was concerned, Thomas was merely another Georgian.