Michael Thorpe

Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras

With this book Jean Moorcroft Wilson admirably completes a quartet of authoritative critical biographies including Sassoon, Rosenberg and Sorley. While those previously discussed are thought of primarily as war poets, Thomas, in Wilson’s words, “eludes or disturbs the category of war poet” (p. 4), despite his dying as an artillery officer at Arras in 1917. Beside correcting “the legendary version” of Thomas’s death and endorsing his wife’s statement that “he wrote no poetry in France” (p. 392), she shows how, in the poems he wrote before volunteering to fight, war was “always in the background” (p. 370), as notably in “The Owl” and “In Memoriam (Easter 1915)”. From this viewpoint Thomas was a war poet like Hardy, whose “In Time of the Breaking of Nations” may be closely compared with Thomas’s “As the Team’s HeadBrass”. Had he lived through the war, Thomas would surely have ranked with our foremost war poets. He entered the war late, without illusions, as “the nearest he ever came to a direct war poem” (p. 274) “This is No Case of Petty Right and Wrong” shows: “I hate not Germans, nor grow hot/With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers”. Had he not been killed so soon, leaving only the fragment of a poem barely begun in his diary, it is likely that his war poetry would have been akin to that of Edmund Blunden, who writes as one sympathizing with devastated Nature as fellow sufferer, “a harm-less young shepherd in a soldier’s coat”. Surprisingly, the affinity with Blunden is not remarked by Wilson. Throughout her deeply researched biography she traces the ups and downs of Thomas’s melancholic, intensely self-critical life, though rejecting the myth of him as a poverty-stricken hack writer; he was a permanent depressive, who took opium and twice attempted suicide. She returns constantly to analysing Thomas’s condition. His previous substantial biographer William Cooke aptly entitled a chapter “The Divided Self”, but as Wilson points out “psychiatry was in its infancy” (p. 120), there was no adequate treatment for a condition which Thomas himself diagnosed as “writer’s melancholy” (p. 126), familiar in the Romantic poets. One thinks of Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, echoed in the mood of Thomas’s “The Glory’, where he asks “must I be content with discontent”. The long poem “The Other” is a convincing imaginative effort at self-analysis. It is a curious irony that the war did, in a sense, alleviate Thomas’s lifelong temperamental curse. He had vacillated since 1914 before enlisting: his close friend Robert Frost’s well known poem, “The Road Not Taken” was written “partly as a gentle dig to his friend” (p. 290)—“partly” because, in their walks together Thomas would typically regret having chosen one path over another. There are other explanations offered for Thomas’s finally joining up: Frost claimed Thomas told him it was “to prove his courage, by going into danger” (p. 294); another close friend, Eleanor Farjeon, records that when she asked him why he had chosen to enlist, he “picked up a pinch of earth. ‘Literally, for this,’ [he said]. He crumbled it between finger and

Thomas Hardy and Empire; Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self

book semi-scholarly, Klitgård recommends it strongly and thinks it deserves an English translation. In 1925 the man Jespersen called “the most gifted of all my students” (“den bedst begavede av alle mine elever”), Aage Brusendorff, succeeded him in the chair. Brusendorff’s The Chaucer Tradition appeared in English that year, having first been published in Danish. It is still central to scholarship on the Chaucer canon, and Klitgård is right to see it as building a bridge between English and German scholarship. Brusendorff’s suicide in 1932 was a severe blow to Chaucer studies in Denmark, and in Klitgård’s opinion they never recovered. From then on the emphasis is on translations, many of them good. However, he has little time for Mogens Boisen (1910–87), a prolific translator of English literature into Danish who was suspiciously prolific in Klitgård’s view. If the circumstances he relates (p. 199) concerning Boisen’s Ulysses translation are true, they amount to a case of particularly heinous plagiarism. Klitgård is himself convinced that Boisen’s 1952 translation of The Canterbury Tales was not done from the original Middle English as the edition claims, but from R. M. Lumiansky’s 1948 prose translation into modern English—and he shows why. He finds this completely unacceptable, and calls that plagiarism too. He deplores the efforts of “copyists who have not read Chaucer themselves” (p. 268), and concludes by hoping for new translations of The Canterbury Tales as well as of other works. The book is beautifully produced and in this respect a credit to the publisher, but it has no index. Given the detailed contents and the complicated arrangement of the text, this is a serious drawback. One also regrets the lack of a copy-editor—the English has an occasional strong underlay of Danish syntax and some unexpected choices of words. However, the main impresssion is of a lively and interesting text which deserves the wider readership that a translation into Danish would give.

Thomas Hardy Writing Dress

comments by those less sympathetic to new historicist views (e.g. Joseph M. Levine), the force of London’s original claim comes from the detailed synopses of arguments that refuse to fit into received notions of the genre’s evolution. London’s own voice comes through in the arrangement of the voices of the dissenters and it can only enrich our knowledge of what became of literary history in the nineteenth century. By the seventh chapter, London’s rapid fire delivery makes one think that this is a more substantial book posing as a rather slim scholarly volume. The story nevertheless hangs together coherently enough to overrule an encyclopaedic reading.

Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture

and two of them from the recusant Percy family, on the eve of his 1601 rebellion, suggesting that both rebels and government were struggling to annex drama (whether stage-plays or the ritual of trials) to their own purposes. Where Mayer’s strength is historical background, Groves’s is literary. She has many insights on Shakespeare’s refashioning of moments from the cycles, especially the ‘‘secret Passion’’, the imaginative apocryphal expansions of the gospel narrative which survived in the mystery play texts. An intriguing comment comes on Claudio’s silence at the end of Measure for Measure, which Groves compares to that of the resurrected Lazarus—and like Lazarus, too, Claudio has his head covered, and is received by kneeling women. However, Groves cautions that this makes the Duke recall Christ rather than symbolise him—which, as the whole play shows, no mere earthly monarch could adequately do. Another telling detail comes in Friar Laurence’s discovery of the open tomb in Romeo and Juliet, which seems to call up the Easter story—the differences between the two Quartos of 1597 and 1599 are to be explained, in Groves’s view, by Shakespeare’s revising with this in mind. One tiny example: only in Q2 does Benvolio warn Tybalt in the opening scene, ‘‘You know not what you do’’, a clear echo of Christ’s words about his torturers. (I am less confident about the general argument that in the first half of the play, Shakespeare raises our expectations of a comic ending only to subvert them; this ignores the clear explanation by the opening Chorus that the lovers will die.) These are both valuable books, thoroughly researched, fresh in approach, and readable. It would be fascinating to read each author’s review of the other’s work.