‘That remoter, changeless England’

This chapter considers the friendship between de la Mare and Edward Thomas. At its heart there was London, which Thomas left behind, whereas de la Mare remained ‘a true Londoner’. Thomas had moved to the countryside, but he still needed to visit London in order to make a living, and when in London he could see his friend. De la Mare wrote tributes to Thomas, in prose and poetry. He wrote the foreword to Thomas’s Collected Poems in 1920, seeing Thomas’s poetry as a mirror of rural England. In his own prose, Thomas frequently referred to, quoted from, or included whole poems by, de la Mare; and de la Mare had a significant influence on Thomas’s work.