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NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ABBREVIATIONS

Thomas’s editors seem at times to have viewed the provisional quality inherent in his poetry too literally. In PN Review 103, John Pikoulis detailed the liberties taken by R. G. Thomas in the classic Collected Poems (1978). Subsequent editors silently amended some of these, as in the 2004 Faber and Faber re-issue of R. G. Thomas’s edition. In 2008, the record was set straight in more than one sense by Edna Longley’s Edward Thomas: the Annotated Collected Poems, a substantial revision of her 1973 Poems and Last Poems. Her ‘Note on texts’ acknowledges the difficulty of alighting on final versions or titles of Edward Thomas poems, and states her editorial decision to stay with titles that have run the course of time. She generously gives context to apparently high-handed dealings with Thomas manuscripts in the past, revealing how R. G. Thomas’s selection, and creation, of titles for poems in the definitive Collected Poems resulted from lack of access to the printer’s typescript of Edward Thomas’s choice of text in the 1917 Poems. Such scrupulousness asserts Longley’s edition as a genuine contender for the new definitive Edward Thomas text and it remains therefore the main text referred to here, although note is taken of the different versions and successive drafts of poems recorded in R. G. Thomas’s 1978 edition. For the sake of consistency, titles are taken from Longley’s Annotated Collected Poems, but a list of major differences from R. G. Thomas’s Collected Poems appears in the appendices. For frequently appearing sources, abbreviated references are given in the text. Less obvious abbreviations include:

ANCPEdward Thomas: the Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2008)
BerridgeThe Letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge, ed. Anthony Berridge (London: Enitharmon, 1983)
BetweenVirginia Woolf, Between the Acts (London: Hogarth Press, 1941)
BlackbirdsEdward Thomas, Four- and- Twenty Blackbirds (London: Duckworth, 1915)
BottomleyLetters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. G. Thomas (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)
CelticEdward Thomas, Celtic Stories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911)
CPThe Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. G. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)
DCDaily Chronicle (London, August 1901 to February 1913)
ETFEdward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter
Eng lett 376Bodleian MS, Eng lett c 376, Letters to Walter de la Mare
FIPFeminine Influence on the Poets (London: Martin Secker, 1910)
GeorgiansEdward Thomas on the Georgians, ed. Richard Emeny (Cheltenham: Cyder Press, 2004)
GarnettA Selection of Letters to Edward Garnett, ed. Edward Garnett (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1981)
LFYEleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958)
LightLight and Twilight (London: Duckworth, 1911)
NLWNational Library of Wales
NorseNorse Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912)
PortraitR. G. Thomas, Edward Thomas: a Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
PWEdna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986)
‘Reading’‘Reading out of doors’, Atlantic Monthly, 92 (1903), 275–7
SCThe South Country (London: Dent, 1909)
Selected LettersEdward Thomas: Selected Letters, ed. R. G. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
SheafThe Last Sheaf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)
Welsh WritingJudy Kendall, ‘“A Poet at Last”; William H. Davies and Edward Thomas’, in Katie Gramich (ed.), Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English (Cardigan: Parthian, 2008), pp. 32–54

P. J. Croft notes, ‘the continual fluctuations in shape and size and the flexible spacing of handwritten text cannot be accurately imitated in the relative fixity of print’.1 Reproductions of Edward Thomas’s handwritten orthography in the mechanical medium of print are therefore necessarily approximate. The appendices include an example of his handwriting and original manuscripts are accessible on the Oxford University First World War Poetry Digital Archive. The abbreviations and lack of punctuation in a number of Thomas’s notes and letters are left strategically in place since these reflect their status as immediate comments on his composing processes.

Edward Thomas

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