The year in which Edward Thomas died at the age of 39, 1917, was the year in which W. B. Yeats, at the age of 52, married Georgie Hyde-Lees. He was a kind of elder statesman of twentieth-century poetry; it is common to say that when Pound and Eliot arrived in London and began announcing their prescriptions for a new poetic, Yeats had already made the necessary discoveries independently. He had seen the need to throw off nineteenth-century rhetoric and begun forging a poetry which could ‘come to terms with immediate experience … in a language close to common speech’. He was getting a remarkable range of experience into his poetry, bringing it under artistic control, finding it immensely difficult, yes, but not close to unmanageable in the way I've noticed in some poets. And from roughly the period of Georgian Poetry onwards he was to explore with the command of a master artist a theme of particular concern here, the plurality of consciousness.

In ‘The Chalk-Pit’ we have seen Edward Thomas conducting a dialogue between two sides of his own consciousness; ‘The Other’ is a complex interrogation of his own pursuit of an alter ego which he never quite seems able – as with all his experience – to grasp or define: