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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Drained Life

A Drained Life

The author of this book is strongly partisan: and while no one can quarrel with his effort to gain greater recognition for Edward Thomas, it is unfortunate that he finds it necessary to claim that a good minor poet (comparable with Edmund Blunden) was also a first-rate essayist and critic. Quite plainly the pastoral impulse which emerges in his lucid, highly controlled poems was pumped dry to provide pot-boilers in prose for a mainly uncritical audience. Mr Coombes remarks that –

. . . Material difficulties increased during the years that followed, when the Thomases lived in London, Kent, Hampshire. The money he earned by reviewing and by (mostly) commissioned books was never enough to keep off anxiety. There were three children. But despite the melancholia that frequently and for long periods oppressed him, he worked hard, often on material uncongenial to him . . .

A more perceptive biographer might have deduced that Thomas’s melancholia proceeded from his conditions of employment and the tragic smothering of a lyrical gift by enforced journalism. ‘With regular army life’ (R.P. Eckert is quoted) ‘his melancholy and dark agonies disappeared for ever.’ It could well be so. Even today a free-lance journalist, who was also a fine poet, might find great relief by enlisting in the army and ceasing to support his family with an overworked brain. The hand-picked quotations from Thomas’s prose writings are still verbose (a necessary feature of journalist prose if one is paid by the line) and smell strongly of the lamp. The book which could have been written on Thomas’s poetry has been squeezed into the last chapter; andpage 349 the tragic biography of a lyric poet drained by journalism, sandbagged by domesticity, and killed at Arras in 1917, has not been written at all.

1958 (177)