Book description
Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of
First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of
his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with
Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war. The book
also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature,
when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A
generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and
Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously.
These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented
by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost
blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction
began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would
produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century.
But the War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of
New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old. It is these
roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this
remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter
Monday 1917.
Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, short listed for
the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Guardian First Book Award and the
Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Now All Roads Lead to France
is his first prose book.
