'I Should Want Nothing More': Edward Thomas and Simplicity
Journal of the British Academy, 7, 89–121. DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/007.089 Posted 4 November 2019. © The British Academy 2019 ‘I should want nothing more’: Edward Thomas and simplicity Chatterton Lecture on Poetry read 1 November 2018 GUY CUTHBERTSON Abstract: In the years before the First World War, the ‘Simple Life’ became somewhat fashionable, and Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was one of those Edwardians who were attracted to simplicity, both as a way of life and as a way of writing. As a book reviewer and biographer, he greatly admired simplicity in literature (as seen in, among others, William Cobbett, W. H. Davies, J. M. Synge and Robert Frost). His prose moved towards plainness, and his poetry is beautifully simple. This simplicity has been problematic, however. His poetry is unsuited to the decoding and exegesis (which might be suited to Modernism) that universities seek to conduct. Academics studying his poetry have allowed themselves to believe that they have found complexity, hidden beneath superficial simplicity, whereas in fact Thomas is a poet of genuine bareness, clear-as-glass honesty, magical brevity and childlike simplicity. His simplicity has been popular, and seems to suit some 21st-century fashions. Keywords: the Simple Life, simplicity, complexity, Edwardians, universities, First World War, Modernism, Robert Frost, William Cobbett, J. M. Synge In the decade or so before the First World War, simplicity became somewhat fashionable—indeed it was a religion for some. This craze is captured rather wonderfully in the Edwardian hit musical The Arcadians (1909), where the central character is given the name ‘Simplicitas’, idyllic Arcady is recreated in London at a successful new health food restaurant and men are ‘keen as a knife / On the simple life’.1 Although some might want it otherwise, Edward Thomas was part of this atmos- phere.
[Show full text]