"All Things Forget The Forest": The Convergence of the war and the Pastoral in Edward Thomas's Body of Work

Edward Thomas, often identified as a war poet, eludes definitive characterization despite the fact that his poems are often anthologized as war poems. However, unlike other widely-known war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the imagery present in Thomas's poetry contains much subtlety and features dominant usage of nature themes. This project attempts to navigate the multi-faceted world of Edward Thomas through consideration of his love for nature, his melancholic predispositions, and his preoccupations with the looming Great War in order to study Thomas's use of natural imagery in the context of grief, melancholy, and traumatic experience. To give proper consideration to these various contexts, this projects uses Thomas's poetic body of work and written letters as well as a few of Thomas's prose pieces in order to provide extensive background to Thomas's poetry. The trauma theories of Michelle Balaev and Cathy Caruth are given consideration, as well, in order to discuss the themes of trauma as they correspond to Thomas's often haunted nature imagery.