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Introduction: Studying the Composing Process

There is nothing to it. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Johann Sebastian Bach¹

Edward Thomas: the Origins of his Poetry takes the reader into dark, unknown areas of poetic composition in order to excavate a tunnel to a more illumined place. The focus is on the poems and prose of Edward Thomas, a fearless, challenging, typically elusive writer on the composing process. To assist on this journey, reference is made to a range of his writings. These offer a wealth of information on the subject from varying angles: notes prior to writing poems, letters, reviews, prose essays and books, drafts and completed poems. Study of this material offers a rounded picture of Thomas’s poetic processes, since it both documents them and indicates his understanding of them.

Examination of Thomas’s linguistic, literary and historical context provides further insight. William James, Richard Jefferies and Oscar Wilde were major influences. Japanese aesthetics had an enormous effect on poets of Thomas’s time and, coupled with the legacy of the Romantic poets, the Japanese concept of ma (‘space’ or ‘interval’) and the appreciation of absence and shape are evident in Thomas’s work. The preoccupations of near contemporaries Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, herself initially a student of William James, also had important bearings on Thomas’s writing.

Thomas wrote a great deal on the composing process. The most highly regarded critic of contemporary poetry of his day, he produced numerous reviews of other poets. These often refer in passing to aspects of composing, a subject that appears frequently in his prose books and poetry. He conducted several epistolary conversations on his writing with a select group of friends. These included frequent incidental references to his experiences of composition.² To some extent, therefore, Edward Thomas: the Origins of his Poetry provides an epistolary reading of his poetic processes.

Although Thomas often alluded to the composing process, he rarely made it his main subject, with the exception of Feminine Influence on the Poets. However, his writing often implies that darkness and inaccessibility are vital conditions for poetic composition which takes place ‘out in the dark’, a phrase that forms the title of one of his poems. He emphasized the mystery of this process and the importance of retaining lack of awareness of it, and expressed hesitancy in his explanations of it, observing, in an attempt to gloss one of his poems, that ‘I am afraid I am meddling now’.³

Many twentieth-century and twenty-first-century poets share his tendency to shy away from examination of this subject. It is as if they wish to preserve a degree of inaccessibility, or ‘unknowingness’ in their composing processes. In C. B. McCully’s The Poet’s Voice and Craft, a collection of twentieth-century poets’ responses to questions about poetic craft, Douglas Dunn observes:

Accepted wisdom would have us believe that when a poet sets out to explain his methods of working, the risk that is run is nothing less than the possible killing of his gift. I feel inclined to agree. Having accepted the invitation to participate in this series, I now find myself in a state of funk.⁴

In the same book, Edwin Morgan reveals an overwhelming sense that lack of awareness is essential to the craft of poetry: ‘to many of the questions my answer was “I don’t know […] And I don’t want to know!”’ Anne Stevenson declares: ‘I do not believe anyone sitting down with a like set of questions could write a poem.’⁵

W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis’s introduction to Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry also emphasizes inaccessibility as crucial to poetic composition: ‘We have attempted in each case to find the illuminating moment in a poet’s prose, the point at which they reveal something of their own process.’ Their choice of the verbs ‘attempt’, ‘find’ and ‘reveal’ suggests, as does The Poet’s Voice and Craft, that details of composing processes are not directly accessible. Many of the poets’ statements corroborate this. Elizabeth Bishop states: ‘It can’t be done, apparently, by will-power and study alone – or by being “with it” – but I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery & a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.’ Brendan Kennelly describes poetry as ‘an attacking force born of a state of conscious surrender’, turning ‘the whole self into a river of uncertainties’, in ‘an act of rebellion against the poet himself’.⁶

Thomas provided a detailed account of an attempt at writing a poem in 1913 in The Last Sheaf, its biographical accuracy confirmed by a letter to Walter de la Mare. However, he did not approach the subject directly. The relevant passage is buried in a piece apparently focused on the subject of insomnia. This tangential approach to the subject occurs repeatedly in Thomas’s writing, as if to preserve something of the hidden quality of what is revealed. As this book will show, a lateral approach is a quintessential part of the composition process.

Thomas’s rapidity of composition, sometimes completing more than one poem a day, resulted in only brief records of the process involved. As a result, despite his evident interest in this subject, access to his composition processes is to some extent adventitious, limited to what he chose to, happened to or had the opportunity to write down. This is appropriate to the subject matter of this study, which is in part an examination of ways in which drafts and the process of their development into poems are affected strongly by the conditions in which they are written. In Thomas’s case, adventitious circumstances played a crucial part in the emergence and completed content and form of many of his poems.

The influence of the external environment is evident not only in Thomas’s work but in the research that has led up to the writing of this monograph. This research was carried out in tandem to the creation of my first poetry collection The Drier the Brighter. I documented my own processes of composition of this collection as an aid and testing ground for my explorations of Thomas’s composition processes.⁷ The simultaneous composition of both texts has resulted in a number of coincidences in subject matter, form and style, both deliberately and accidentally. Points relating to composition unearthed in this book are explored in The Drier the Brighter. Insights into Thomas’s processes revealed in here have their origins in observations of the composition of The Drier the Brighter.

My seven-year residency in Japan prior to the start of this research also informs this exploration of Thomas’s writing, applying aspects of Japanese aesthetics to his work. Equally, my assimilation of fragmentary postmodernist approaches to poetry and my experimentations in shaped poetry, visual text and collaborative digital poetry have bearings on the argument of Edward Thomas: the Origins of his Poetry.

Different aspects of Thomas’s composing processes are woven together in his practice, as a perusal of this monograph soon makes clear. The book works chronologically through the process of poetic composition, each chapter examining in detail various aspects as they relate to Thomas’s writing. These include elements present before and during the composition process, as well as in the completed pieces and eventual collection of those pieces as a body of work. Since each chapter builds on ground covered in previous chapters, this book makes most sense if read sequentially, although the explanation of references in previous chapters means that the chapters also stand alone.

The first chapter looks at the physical context of the composing process and the influence of external writing conditions on Thomas’s poetry. It focuses on the point at which a poem emerges in the poet’s awareness, the processes that precede that point and the influences of external writing conditions on the poem. It includes a study of Thomas’s explorations of birdsong.

The second chapter examines links in Thomas’s work between poetry composition and oral tradition. It shows how the beginnings of the composing process can be said to lie within experiences of the physical environment, and continues the discussion on birdsong, referring to Virginia Woolf’s work and responses to Thomas’s writing. This chapter also examines Thomas’s attempts to re-invent the anonymous through land and landscape in his writing of poetry and prose. His experience of external conditions when composing is explored in the context of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s descriptions of composition in natural surroundings.

In the third chapter, emphasis is placed on ways in which absence is used to articulate experiences of the environment in Thomas’s writing. Attention is paid to absence as it appears in his drafts and poems: in the form of ellipses, indicators of omission, and aporia, representing what is inaccessible. This chapter also looks at the active part blank space plays in drafts and in completed works, and the emotional import of such space. Absence as a measure of the point at which a work coheres into a completed text is also discussed, as is the play of fore- and backgrounds in Thomas’s work and the influence on him of Keats’s theory of negative capability and of Japanese aesthetics.

Chapters 4 and 5 continue the work on absence, examining, in Thomas’s composing process and completed pieces, his use of absence as gaps or unfilled space, and as ‘unfinishedness’. This is discussed also in the context of the Japanese aesthetics of absence; the research of William James; Freud’s work on the role gaps play in thought processes; James’s and Woolf’s emphasis on the importance of vagueness in the writing process; Richard Jefferies’s suspended endings; and Oscar Wilde’s experimentations with the spoken voice. Discussion of the art of submission in composing leads to an analysis of the ways in which a writer learns to submit to the unfolding patterns revealed by a work in progress, and the ways in which that work continues to be in process even when completed.

The sixth chapter investigates the crucial role in Thomas’s writing of dislocation resulting from physical and temporal disturbances caused by changes in external writing conditions or by the transforming effects of memory. This chapter also examines Thomas’s use of temporal dislocation, drawing, once again, on the work of James and Freud. Reference is also made to the importance of physical dislocation when composing.

Chapter 7 continues examining the role of dislocation in composing, looking at distraction, associative non-logical or other indirect connections, and the resultant shifts in attention. It draws on the writings of James, Freud and Coleridge, and experiments conducted by Gertrude Stein. The distancing of the writer from works in progress that occurs as a result of readers’ feedback on drafts and completed poems, and the effects on the poem of a focus that tracks the present moment and immediate physical sensations are also discussed.

The eighth and concluding chapter argues for the importance of a sustained, open and exact attention to immediate perceptions and thoughts when composing. Making reference to James, Freud and Woolf and to Japanese aesthetics, Thomas’s development of the art of ‘divagations’, perfected by him in his poetic work, is examined, as is the way his poetry, controlled but flexible, resists conclusions, and so succeeds, even in its completed forms, to remain in process. This chapter also refers to Thomas’s use of enveloping perspectives and concludes with a discussion of the lack of conclusiveness in his writing, confirming his special position and importance as a poet of the composing process.

Although the focus in this book remains on Thomas, much of what is said applies to other poets and artists. The epigraphs prefacing each section of the book encourage such readings. Some show Thomas approaching the subject from unexpected angles. Others shift the focus to poets from different times and contexts and artists in varying creative disciplines, suggesting, intentionally, that elements of Thomas’s composition processes identified and isolated here apply also to musicians, artists, thinkers, dictionary-makers.

We are all creators.

Judy Kendall

Salford Quays