In Easter 1986 Jeremy Hooker recorded the following note in his Journal, recently reprinted by Shearsman and titled Openings:
It is easy to see the limitations of others’ ways of thinking and seeing; far harder to see one’s own. Thus, in seeing Edward Thomas, in In Pursuit of Spring, cycling through the south country recording natural observations and impressions, in 1913, picking up practically no sign of the forces in his world that would soon violently and horrifically transform it, so that anyone looking back now sees the massive iron structures of imperial powers about to collide, sees them shadowing the green roads and villages he cycles through; in seeing this, I saw also the history—the idea of history—which bounds my vision of place and wondered what it excludes, what I am blind to.
Perhaps it is the violence and horror, which Thomas couldn’t see then, that, for some of us, makes the word of Christ live, as for many they did not, during that long and seemingly endless peace before August 1914.
This thought might well serve as a useful starting-point for any teachers or pupils who wanted to look at the poetry in England leading up to the war. For instance, does a lot of Georgian Poetry look back nostalgically to a world that seemed endless, a world in which the clock seems always stopped at ten-to-three’?
There is a blog about this book on the website for the poetry magazine Tears in the Fence: www.tearsinthefence.com