But this notion of escape being complicated doesn’t just prove his maturity, it also leads us back to his peculiar brand of honesty. Note first, however, how he avoids the cardinal mistake in being too honest — being too boring. Contrary to what your girlfriend may tell you, no one else wants to sit through your versified account of the 1001 ways you courted her. Being selective makes your story appear more real, more true to life.

What then was his peculiar brand of honesty? As we’ve seen, he was one of those evergreen confessional lyricists. To write as he did — heading down a path, then reversing just as quickly — is to work out the kinks in life; poetry as therapy. But if writing his poems was as salutary for him as reading them is for us, it’s because so many contemporary efforts — in the same genre, no less — feel shallow in contrast. Insincere. Poetry slam, however impressive it might sound at first, loses its fire on the page. The very nature of "spoken word" militates against any but the most superficial of effects. Enter Thomas’ carefully-crafted poetry. We find him sincere, as we do other good poets, because raw emotion is distilled and controlled. Discipline gives pleasure. In his work we find Real Adult Whining: candor made art.

The flip side of this candor is the quiet despair that permeates most of his poems. It arises from his concerns — memory and experience, innocence lost — and his knack for seeing, like most poets, life as a series of frail ambiguities. He comprehended failure and fulfillment simultaneously. And, in a move frustrating though in the end rewarding for the reader, he tried to convey this tension in his poems. Just look at the convoluted syntax of Old Man, another poem of his that teases out the elusive, personal meanings of a “hoar-green feathery herb” known as Old man and Lad’s love.

Old Man, or Lad’s-love, — in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

But before you give out an exasperated sigh at his stop and starts, pay attention to his careful, sometimes dramatic, punctuation. Now Edward’s struggle to stay true to his conception of things, as seen in the teeth-gnashing syntax of Old Man, can make for tough reading; but this personal honesty is precisely what makes him so individual. Indeed, the knotted syntax, twisting and turning on itself, feels contemporary; it convinces us with its modernist sensibility. Truth is elusive; work hard to get at it. T. S. Eliot would surely approve.

It's true though that Thomas didn’t make as much of a splash as Eliot. Far from it. He simply doesn't have enough anthology-worthy poems; nor is he known for any firecracker heart-stopping phrases. But he does offer a few lessons for all would-be lyric poets (in other words, almost all fledging poets today), the most compelling of which is this. Writing is itself artifice. The ostensibly formless squiggles of fashionable young poets is as much a "style", as much a form, as terza rima. To unthinkingly ape "free verse," or whatever is the form of the season, then, is to proclaim yourself a stick-in-the-mud; to limit yourself unnecessarily, to choke off, not free, your voice. Heed Edward Thomas’ example: let imagination impart lasting life to the transient things you write of, so that your work may in turn live on through the ages.

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