Review of the Day:
Now all roads lead to France

Winner of the Costa Prize for Biography Now all Roads Lead to France was hotly tipped for the overall prize but lost out to Andrew Miller’s novel Pure.

Edward Thomas’ life as a poet was very short. Having worked as a journalist and writer from the time of his graduating from Oxford he was well entrenched in the literary world of pre WWI London. As a reviewer of poetry his influence on the poets of his day was significant, and yet he did not complete his own first poem until late 1914. For the next two and a half years, until his death at Arrass on Easter Monday 1917, he wrote poetry almost without stopping. His first collection of sixty-four poems was not published until after his death, first appearing in October 1917.

Now all Roads lead to France chronicles Thomas’ life from 1913 until his death drawing heavily on letters, journals and other accounts to weave together his life as a writer and the cost this had on his life as a husband and father. Prone to melancholy and dark moods Thomas was weighed down by the need to earn a living to support his family. It was only in finding the poet within that he found a more even plane.

Central to Thomas’ development as a poet was his friendship with the American poet Robert Frost who spent a number of years in England, notably amongst the Dymock poets in Gloucestershire. Frost recognised in his friend the poet perhaps even before Thomas did himself.

Not familiar with Thomas’ work I read this biography with a copy of his collected work alongside. (The collection was fortunately arranged in chronological order of writing and therefore ran parallel to the text.) I also searched out the works of the other poets of Thomas’ circle of fellow writers as these illuminated the story of the development of Thomas as a poet.

Author Matthew Hollis, a poet himself, has a sympathetic eye for his subject, though sadly I was left with a feeling of not really having ‘liked’ Edward Thomas. A man battling his demons for many years it was however tragic that he died just at the point in his life when, through his poetry and the fulfilment it brought him, he wanted to live.

This biography is heavily annotated and I recommend that two bookmarks are used as I found myself constantly flipping back and forth to the notes.

A poetry-reading group would find much to discuss in this book alongside Thomas’ poetry, or in context with a study of the War Poets of World War I.