Read Some Desperate Glory for Free Online

time of his life and a love-affair with a Tahitian woman that inspired the tender poem ‘Tiare Tahiti’. His thoughts on England showed confusion, anti-Semitism and harshness towards women. The problem was, Brooke thought, that it was hard to believe in a place still ‘under that irresponsible and ignorant plutocracy’, with London full of ‘lean and vicious people, dirty hermaphrodites and eunuchs, moral vagabonds, pitiable scum…’ By June 1914 he was back. Rupert Brooke’s last summer was a packed season, under Marsh’s sway.
    During the final months of peace, he went down to Dymock, to visit the poets who gathered round this village on the border of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Wilfred Gibson was there, as were Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater, and the predominant tone was Georgian. To Brooke, Dymock was a paradise where, staying in Gibson’s cottage, ‘one drinks great mugs of cider, & looks at fields of poppies in the corn’. After 1918, the village and its poets became part of the myth of a lost England. Among those who went there were the American poet Robert Frost and the Englishman Edward Thomas.
    Edward Thomas had a sense that ‘all was foretold’, that man was ultimately helpless, even with his vast destructive power. From a large family, the son of a civil servant who had raised himself from a poor Welsh background, he grew up in south London. Educated at various schools, including briefly the private St Paul’s, before winning a scholarship to Oxford, Thomas found life with his parents hard. His domineering father was a late-Victorian and Edwardian success story. Mr Thomas pushed his children and was once furious with his son for faltering when about to win a half-mile race. Mrs Thomas was loving, but her husband ruled. The failure in the half-mile, and his father’s refusal to forgive, was etched into Edward, as would a later incident of what he saw as his cowardice in the woods near Dymock.
    A mist over Clapham Common could hint at unexplored wildness during his boyhood and there was open country to the south. When Edward Thomas stayed with his father’s mother at Swindon, he could reach a wilder landscape, stirring an early romanticism and love of solitude. Always, however, there was pressure. Mr Thomas, in spite of his success, felt thwarted; he had stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Lloyd George Liberal and his debating skills were restricted to advocating positivism in south London. He became jingoistic and shrill.
    Edward married early; this brought escape, but the marriage had been forced upon him. Helen Noble was the daughter of a literary critic who had encouraged Edward’s first writings about landscape and walking. While Edward was still at Oxford, Helen told him she was pregnant; Mr Thomas disapproved of the marriage and of his son’s wish to be a writer rather than a civil servant. How would they provide for their children?
    It was a good question. Edward’s failure to get a First barred him from the security of an Oxford academic post. He set out as a writer, desperately seeking work, and the struggle darkened his depression and self-pity. Domestic life was hard, not made easier by platonic liaisons, one with the writer Eleanor Farjeon. But by 1914 Thomas was earning £400 a year from reviewing and writing – the equivalent today of some £30,000 to £40,000 – and had become an influential critic, particularly of poetry. The desired life, however, with his family or having the time to appreciate beauty, to write what he wanted, became impossible. ‘I was born to be a ghost,’ he wrote.
    The Thomases lived in Kent and Hampshire. Edward came to know the south of England, although he still thought himself Welsh. He liked small country churches rather than cathedrals, folk songs rather than oratorios and took Richard Jefferies to his heart. Like Sassoon, Blunden and Gurney, he saw