Edward Thomas Day Conference, 12 March (report): "all the bards, nearly, of Oxfordshire and where else...." (Seamus Heaney)

March 24, 2005

Sponsored by Tower Poetry and supported by the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English Language and Literature, this one-day conference on ‘Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry’ was held at St Edmund Hall, Oxford on Saturday 12 March. It was a particularly successful day and the full programme included readings and discussion by many of the leading poets of today. The following report by Guy Cuthbertson of Queen’s College, Oxford, one of the organisers of the conference, describes the day:

”..all the bards, nearly, of Oxfordshire and where else….” (Seamus Heaney)

Edward Thomas’s small collection of poems was one of the most important contributions to modern poetry, and his writing is admired by many contemporary poets, so the conference explored both Thomas’s poetry and its relation to poetry today. The day was divided into two halves: a morning session in the Old Dining Hall, which consisted of two plenary lectures and two shorter papers; and in the afternoon, in the larger Wolfson Hall, a unique poetry reading followed by a question-and-answer session with Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate.

At the poetry reading, sixteen prominent poets read, and discussed, poems of theirs that have, in some way, been influenced or inspired by Thomas, and many of these were new poems. The reading was divided into two panels, and the poets included David Constantine, Jane Draycott, Jane Griffiths, Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue and Jon Stallworthy. There were also contributions by some poets who couldn’t be there on the day, including Seamus Heaney, who wrote a poem about Thomas specially for the event. Most of the poets who took part have some connections with Oxford – to use Seamus Heaney’s remark about the day, the audience of about two hundred people heard ‘all the bards, nearly, of Oxfordshire’, as well as bards from elsewhere.

The plenary lectures were given by Edna Longley and Jem Poster, and the shorter papers by Tom Paulin and Guy Cuthbertson. Jem Poster and Guy Cuthbertson looked at Thomas’s relationship with the literature written after his death in 1917, but the Great War was also discussed during the morning. Tom Paulin talked about how the Great War is there in ‘The Owl’, and Edna Longley’s lecture, entitled ‘Going Back to Edward Thomas’, was particularly close to the interests of the War Poets Association. Longley re-read Thomas’s poetry in relation to ecology, memory, modernism and the war. More than one thing turned Thomas into a poet, but the war was ‘a perverse muse’, and, of course, Great War poetry is not necessarily Trenches poetry. While Edna Longley discussed Thomas and birds, one could hear some birds singing in the churchyard of St Peter in the East, which is now part of St Edmund Hall and is praised in Thomas’s Oxford (1903), where he says that there is ‘a peace which only the thrush and blackbird break, and even their singing is at length merely the most easily distinguishable part of the great melody of the place’.

Guy Cuthbertson, Queen’s College, University of Oxford