Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another

Rating:
Summary: No Service to an Important Friendship
Review: Too few Americans know that Frost had his first success as a poet in England, and that the English poet and literary journalist Edward Thomas contributed to that success.
Frost called Thomas "the only brother I ever had." The two had many things in common, and they formed a close friendship from their first meeting in October 1913 until Thomas was killed in battle in France in April 1917. They took long walks together while Frost was living in Gloucestershire in 1914, and both wrote poems about this--Frost's "Iris by Night" and Thomas's "The sun used to shine."
Thomas helped Frost refine his theories of "the sound of sense" and wrote reviews praising his second book, North of Boston. Frost prompted Thomas to discover his own poetic talent, and Thomas wrote over 140 poems in about two years, some of which--like "I Remember Adlestrop"--were loved and learned by generations of English schoolchildren.
So this assembly of the surviving correspondence between the two offers readers some insight into the nature of the friendship, but holds disappointments as well. The editor, Matthew Spencer, offers no explanation for the surprising six-to-one imbalance of the letters in favor of Thomas, though available sources, including some in his bibliography, indicate that Thomas burned most of his correspondence before going to France. Nor does he provide an index, though the letters contain numerous references to well-known writers of the time. Spencer does outline the circumstances that led Frost to England, but he skips over the publication of Frost's first book, A Boy's Will. His account of Thomas's years of freelancing under a cloud of depression and the brief flourishing of his friendship with Frost may be a useful review for readers already acquainted with the story, but will hardly help newcomers understand the fragmented version of it in the letters.
Michael Hofmann's Foreword and Christopher Ricks's Afterword might have provided helpful insight into the friendship, but these two writers choose instead to ride their own hobby-horses. Hofmann takes off on a weird psychosexual interpretation of the friendship, and Ricks entertains himself with a series of rhapsodies on the theme of Anglo-American rivalry, all the while noting that it doesn't apply to Frost and Thomas!
There are much better sources for understanding the Frost-Thomas friendship, including Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years by Eleanor Farjeon and "The Only Begetter," a chapter in John Evangelist Walsh's Into My Own.