On Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, at 7:36 A.M., 2nd Lieutenant Philip Edward Thomas, of the Royal Garrison Artillery, was killed by a German shell at Arras. For the world at large, there was nothing to connect this sadly commonplace addition to the war’s death toll with the publication, the previous December, of Six Poems by “Edward Eastaway,” whose larger collection, Poems, appeared posthumously, in October, under the same pseudonym. Only with Last Poems (1918) was it revealed that Edward Eastaway and Edward Thomas were the same person, whose death at the age of thirty-nine was a grievous loss to English letters. One of the last poems he wrote, “Lights Out,” is spoken by someone on “the borders of sleep,” imaged as a healing oblivion, a forest (one of Thomas’s recurring symbols) which he gladly enters:

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Thomas’s widow, Helen, was anxious that this should not be read as a death-wish, Edna Longley tells us, adding, “for Thomas, sleep and dream are usually positive, aligned with the creative process,” as she shows by quoting from his prose. In 1973, Longley published an edition of Poems and Last Poems which she has now greatly enlarged and enriched, providing detailed annotation linking Thomas’s poems to his other writings (as in this instance) and developing a highly original critical commentary.