“It Would Have Been Another World”: War Theme in Poetry by Edward Thomas

Abstract

The British poet Edward Thomas who was killed on the Western Front discovered his poetical talent during the First Word War. According to some critics, it’s mostly due to the war he was inspired to write 142 poems in the space of 2 years. The paper tries to answer the question whether it would be appropriate to consider Thomas a “war poet”, and if yes, in what sense. The article examines influence of the war on Thomas’s poetry and considers representation of the war theme in his poetical works. Scientific originality of the research is conditioned by absence of studies on Thomas’s creative work in domestic literary criticism; his name is almost unknown in Russia. The following conclusions are justified: though Thomas couldn’t be considered a “trench poet”, the war theme, often implicitly, through nature images, appears in many of his poems, becoming a leitmotif of his poetry.

References

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: May 18, 2020.
• Published: July 15, 2020.

Keywords

• Эдвард Томас
• поэзия XX века
• литература Первой мировой войны
• стихи о войне
• образы природы
• Edward Thomas
• XX-century poetry
• literature of the First World War
• war poetry
• nature images

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