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Robert Frost & Edward Thomas: Poets
The Story of a Friendship
As might be expected Robert Frost gets forty pages in The Norton Anthology of American Literature compared to his fellow poet and contemporary, Wallace Stevens, who only gets fifteen. But then, by the time of his death in 1963, Frost had effectively been America’s poet laureate for three decades.
My first contact with Robert Frost came many years ago when I read about his stay in Britain as the First World War loomed, and his friendship with the British poet Edward Thomas, a friendship that, for both of them, was life changing.
That same story came back to me recently when I read poet Matthew Hollis’s biography of Thomas, Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, which is a masterpiece of its genre: beautifully written with love and a clear understanding of the period, and of the effect that Thomas and Frost had on each other, and the sharing of a genuine love that stopped the two men from travelling along the road to self destruction, although Thomas’s death in 1917 when serving as an artillery officer in France, now has a feeling of inevitability about it, with Frost’s professed desire to fight, but eventual avoidance (he was too old anyway) of the conflict — and his attempts, after his return to the US, to get Thomas to move there and out of harm’s way — and his subsequent literary…
