Edward Thomas (1878–1917) is now one of the best-loved twentieth-century poets, whose influence has spread ripples in the creative pond far greater than the small amount of poetry he wrote ever did during his lifetime. He was regarded as ‘the father of us all’ by Ted Hughes, and, considered as a Georgian associate in his lifetime, he can be seen as responsible for rescuing the quiet, personal style from triviality and sterility. Thomas's countryside is one where the walker can feel lost and threatened, and there are ramifications beyond the words on the page. It is possible to read matters into his poetry in a way that one cannot do with Gibson and Drinkwater, making Thomas a culturally rich experience beyond his time, whereas Gibson and Drinkwater are irretrievably stuck in theirs. He is not obvious, no matter how plain his verse may seem; he is spiritual, but not in a religiose, churchy way; he is an observer, but his powers of observation put him closer to his subject matter than the poetry of those who work from an external stimulus. His posthumous reputation immediately begs the question of why he took so long to realize his poetic ambitions, when even a friend of relatively short acquaintance, like Robert Frost, could see that he was wasting his talents on the wrong kinds of literature.

Thomas's biography is well known compared to those of other Georgians, so there is less need to repeat facts which can easily be gained from literary histories and the prefaces to modern editions. But what is not generally known is the difficulty Thomas had in formulating his own character in the first place, meaning that his long evolving towards poetry is not only symptomatic of the man, but might have been a good deal shorter if he had followed his original instincts. A collection of letters to Harry Hooton in the Bodleian Library gives details of Thomas the undergraduate as he was in 1897–9 and the picture as it stood before he embarked on married life and a full-time writing career. Thomas the young aesthete was quite different from the remote melancholic with the black moods and family tensions which became noticeable in his later life.