The Last Years of Edward Thomas
Robert Frost and Edward Thomas
The 2011 Costa Biography Prize was deservedly awarded to Matthew Hollis’ haunting account of Edward Thomas’s final years, ‘Now All Roads Lead to France’.
Thomas was the most beguiling of the poets who lost their lives in the First World War, and although he was more or less unread in his lifetime, his writing has had a powerful influence on poetry today. Hollis’s account of his final years is centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost, and his decision to enlist in the army and fight in France.
The book evokes an astonishingly creative period in English literature, with a new generation of poets emerging including W.B.Yeats, Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. Hollis’s beautifully structured account tells the story with compassion and wit. ‘Now All Roads Lead to France’ Faber and Faber, 2011, PB £9.99
