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Nature and Home in the Poetry of Edwardthomas and Robert Frost

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‘What to make of a diminished thing’: nature and home in the poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912–1917 A.C. Stenning PhD 2014 1 ‘What to make of a diminished thing’: nature and home in the poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912–1917 A.C. Stenning A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy PhD 2014 University of Worcester 2 ABSTRACT ‘Ecopoetry’ has been identified as a subset of nature poetry that proposes alternative modes of human inhabitation on the earth, often by focusing on what it means to be at ‘at home’ in nature. This is linked to the ecocritical interest in place-making, as an alternative to the homogenized spaces of capitalism. And yet the idea of place as ‘home’ or shelter has been criticised for its conservatism, and for the ways it ignores the dynamic simultaneity of the planet. This has urged some critics to focus instead on poetic evocation of space. Here I argue that Thomas’s and Frost’s poetry of home and ‘extra-vagance’ between 1912 and 1917 suggests the dialectical connections between our homes and other spaces, places and times. At the same time, these concepts convey both the necessity and limits of language to suggest these experiences. This version of home is constantly seeking its antithesis, forming what Éduard Glissant called ‘rooted errantry’. While this idea is apparent prior to the poets’ meeting, it becomes most prominent both during and after Thomas and Frosts’ meeting, particularly in those poems that address the impact of nature on the human mind in ‘wayfaring’. In addition to my development of ecocriticism and ecopoetry, the study furthers Thomas and Frost scholarship by emphasising the philosophical, as well as poetic, influence of both poets on each other. This influence been underplayed by national affiliations in British criticism and, where it is explained, attributed to Frost’s theory of the ‘sound of sense’ rather than to his philosophical interests. Further, national interests have undervalued the importance of Frost’s stay in England to his mature poetic theorising: his learning from T.E. Hulme and his experiences of ‘extra-vagance’ and walks with Thomas, and have subsequently undervalued the importance of these encounters for Frost’s poems written during and after this period. This alignment between Thomas and Frost highlights, at the same time, Thomas’s critical difference from the Georgians. Thomas and Frost’s physical and poetic extra-vagance prefigures Timothy Ingold’s writing about ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold 2011). In addition, I argue that Thomas’s and Frost’s poetry of référance, dialogue and birdsong shows how the poets are concerned with representing the processes of experience, rather than presenting static ideas. After their likely contact with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, both poets seem to demonstrate that the processional and dynamic aspects of non-human nature resemble the forces that they observe in their own minds. Thomas and Frost illustrate how being at home, either in non-human nature or the mind, will always involve a process of negotiation with other conflicting impulses and ‘otherness’. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of traditional pastoral poetry. 3 EPIGRAPH Long ago men said that mankind was like an ants’ nest, but they did not believe it. Only a theologian said it, and for joy of an ingenious invention, they repeated it as if it were a reality. But now we can see mankind so. It is not the spaces of stars that terrify us, but the spaces between one lover and the other, between a child and the dead that bore him. (Edward Thomas 1911a: 99) Image on following page: Wassily Kandinsky, Munich-Schwabing With The Church Of St. Ursula, 1908, oil on canvas, 68.8 × 49cm, Lenbachhaus Gallery, Munich <http://www.wassily kandinsky.net/work-5. php> [accessed 5 October 2014]. 4 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is the result of my work undertaken at the University of Worcester, Graduate Research School, between October 2010 and June 2015. The University of Worcester provided a bursary for three years of these studies, without which this project would not have been possible. I would like to thank my Director of Studies, Dr David Arnold, for his insightful support and encouragement for my work on this project. I am also grateful to the other members of my supervisory team at the University of Worcester, Dr John Parham and Professor Roger Ebbatson, for kindly and freely giving so much of their time and expertise to support the project. I would like to thank the Friends of the Dymock Poets, especially Barbara Davis, the late Roy Palmer, and Pat Palmer, for sharing their extensive knowledge and care for the poets and the landscapes that inspired them. The Friends of the Dymock Poets and the University of Worcester funded my visit to the New York Public Library to study Edward Thomas’s field notebooks from his stay in Gloucestershire and his unpublished essays from 1913 to 1914. I would like to thank Richard Emeny and the Edward Thomas Fellowship for their help. I would especially like to thank my colleague Pippa Marland, and other members of ASLE-UKI: this community has been invaluable. I would like to acknowledge the help of the archivists at the New York Public Library, Berg Collection, and the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. I am grateful to the help of The Gloucestershire Archives and the Dymock Poets Archive at the University of Gloucestershire. I would like to thank Rosemary Vellender for her support for my work. I owe much to Edward Thomas scholars Guy Cuthbertson and Robert Macfarlane, especially for their friendship and support along the PhD journey. I am also grateful to Donald Sheehy and Robert Bernard Hass for their hospitality during my brief stay North-West of Boston. This project would not have been possible without the support of my family and friends, including Jessica Pritchard and Lola Barnes and, in the final stages especially, Lee Clifton. 6 CONTENTS Introduction: ‘What to make of a diminished thing’: nature and home in the poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912-1917 Chapter One: Nature, poetry and place Introduction Nation and region: Robert Frost Edward Thomas Nature and the countryside: Edward Thomas Robert Frost Aesthetics: Edward Thomas Robert Frost Chapter Two: Home, ‘extra-vagance’ and ecstasy Introduction Towards a comparative ecocritical treatment of place The importance of space Space and place: Edward Thomas Robert Frost ‘Extra-vagance’ Home and wayfaring Towards a poetics of relation Conclusion: against home as dwelling place Chapter Three: ‘Those things that poets said’ - home, extra-vagance, and poetic form Introduction The importance of speech rhythms 7 Robert Frost T.E. Hulme, the Imagists and Henri Bergson Robert Frost Edward Thomas Home and extra-vagance: readings Edward Thomas Robert Frost Référance Edward Thomas Robert Frost Birdsong and home Edward Thomas Robert Frost Dialogue Edward Thomas Robert Frost Chapter Four: Place and wayfaring Introduction: place and wayfaring Wayfaring Knowledge through wayfaring: Robert Frost Edward Thomas Sky, earth and weather-world Edward Thomas Robert Frost Skills Edward Thomas Robert Frost Writing as wayfaring 8 Robert Frost Edward Thomas Meshwork Robert Frost Edward Thomas An ecohistorical view? Edward Thomas Robert Frost Observing rural life Alternative versions of the pastoral Edward Thomas Robert Frost Chapter Five: Home and extra-vagance in ecocriticism Introduction Transatlantic perspectives on Edward Thomas and Robert Frost Towards a poetry of relation: Edward Thomas Robert Frost The other within the human Edward Thomas Robert Frost Future projects Bibliography Appendix - A note on poetic form 9 A NOTE ON SOURCES For biographical details on Edward Thomas, this thesis draws mostly on R. George Thomas’s authoritative Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). This remains the definitive account, based on extensive archival research, the author’s friendship with Thomas’s wife, Helen, and access to 1,800 letters. For Robert Frost, I draw extensively on Lawrance Thompson’s Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874–1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) and Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1998). The Thompson biography is still the most authoritative, as part of a three-volume authorized life that was based on Thompson’s interviews with the poet over twenty years. Following his unsympathetic account of Frost’s personal relationships, writers such as Parini have offered a corrective. The quotations from Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval, and elsewhere where relevant, come from Collected Poetry, Prose and Plays (New York: The Library of America), edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, hereby abbreviated to CPPP. This is the standard, authoritative version based on Complete Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1949) and In the Clearing (first American edition, New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1962), which Frost saw through press. CPPP also includes a selection of formerly unpublished poems and the uncollected play A Way Out, in addition to the formerly unpublished plays In an Art Factory and The Guardeen. The chronology of individual poems is not always clear because Frost often retained poems for inclusion in later volumes. For additional help on dating poems I have drawn on Nancy Tuten and John Zubizaretta’s (eds) The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (Westwood CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2001). Where I quote Edward Thomas’s poems, I draw on Edna Longley’s Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2008). This edition uses the most comprehensive range of textual sources for titles and versions of individual poems, including An Anthology of New Poetry (from 1917, containing 18 poems by Thomas under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway), Poems (also from 1917, containing 64 of Thomas’s poems under his pseudonym), Last Poems (1918), Collected Poems (1920 and 1928) and Edward Thomas’s annotated printers’ proofs of Poems from just before he died, only discovered in 1981.
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