Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 The nineteenth century: pastoral versions of England
- 2 Edward Thomas: An England of ‘holes and corners’
- 3 Forster and Lawrence: exiles in the homeland
- 4 Late witness: George Sturt and village England
- 5 Contending Englands: F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot
- 6 Englands within England: Waugh and Orwell
- 7 Larkin, Betjeman and the aftermath of ‘England’
- 8 Geoffrey Hill and the ‘floating of nostalgia’
- Afterword: A homemade past
- Index
2 - Edward Thomas: An England of ‘holes and corners’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 The nineteenth century: pastoral versions of England
- 2 Edward Thomas: An England of ‘holes and corners’
- 3 Forster and Lawrence: exiles in the homeland
- 4 Late witness: George Sturt and village England
- 5 Contending Englands: F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot
- 6 Englands within England: Waugh and Orwell
- 7 Larkin, Betjeman and the aftermath of ‘England’
- 8 Geoffrey Hill and the ‘floating of nostalgia’
- Afterword: A homemade past
- Index
Summary
never aiming at what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete, – I wished to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat.
Most of the writers discussed in this book shared Thomas's belief that poets and politicians who bang the drum for England simply deflect us from what it really is:
The worst of the poetry being written today is that it is too deliberately, and not inevitably, English. It is for an audience: there is more in it of the shouting of rhetorician, reciter, or politician than of the talk of friends and lovers.
At a time of national crisis a true intimacy of speech was more necessary than ever. People needed to speak to and not at each other. England should not turn into a debating chamber. Hence, Thomas's distaste for the public intimacies of Rupert Brooke. Yet his own shyness might have struck earlier poets – Drayton, say, or Milton – as odd and even morbid. Isn't all poetry ‘for an audience’? For Thomas, the ‘audience’ is a snare and a distraction from his ‘England’, a realm stripped of all urbanity which he thinks of as ‘a place of innumerable holes and corners’. Not, that is, an England to be found on any official map.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literary EnglandsVersions of 'Englishness' in Modern Writing, pp. 28 - 66Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993