Again, we are touching on associations and the connections that make for such bibliographical delights. Here between poets during the early years of the twentieth century, who had a love of the countryside and in some cases Gloucestershire countryside in particular.
All the books featured here are elusive, but particularly so in their precious and fragile dust-jackets. The authors, all near contemporaries, knew or knew of each other. Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), John “Jack” Haines and J. W Harvey (1888-1957) were great friends and the latter two local solicitors. They all admired the prose and poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917), as did John Freeman (1880-1929), another poet who was a friend of Haines.
Let us start with Ivor Gurney, born and raised in Gloucester, he was poet and composer, particularly of melodic songs. He fought in the First World War, survived the conflict, but spent a tragic life confined to mental hospitals. Featured here is his second volume of poems War’s Embers, published in 1919 by Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd. His first book of poems had been Severn and Somme published in 1917.
His two great Gloucestershire friends were J.W. Harvey and John Haines. We have here a copy of Harvey’s Gloucestershire Friends, poems from a German Prison Camp, published by Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd in 1917, containing poems sent from the camp. Also featured is Haines’ Poems published by Selwyn & Blount Ltd in 1921. Both copies coming down to us in the fragile and now elusive jackets.
Edward Thomas, perhaps the best known of these poets and an author of prose, was to write In Pursuit of Spring, published by Thomas Nelson in 1914, a splendid evocation of the season and his observations on a journey from London travelling through the counties to the West, accompanied by a friend and a bicycle. It is redolent with poetic overtones that were to lead American poet Robert Frost to see the true poet in Thomas and for Frost to encourage the writing of the splendid countryside poems that are his legacy. Here is a copy of the first edition, with that elusive jacket and the illustrations by Ernest Haslehurst. He also carried a camera and a far later edition of 2016 published by Little Toller Books contains a selection of his photographs taken on the journey, now preserved at Cardiff University.
Ivor Gurney, whilst admiring Thomas and his poems, setting a number of them to music, was never to meet him, Thomas being killed in 1917 on the Western Front. However, Thomas’ wife Helen was memorably to visit Gurney in hospital and was to delight him with Thomas’ maps of Gloucestershire which he pored over following the countryside walks of Edward Thomas over a landscape that he would never walk or even see again.
In 1919 Haines was to write an informative and revealing memoir of Edward Thomas contained within In Memoriam, Edward Thomas, his essay entitled Edward Thomas as I Knew Him, in which he relates first meeting Thomas in 1914 at Lascelles Abercrombie’s cottage, then occupied by the American poet, Robert Frost.
John Freeman first published poetry in 1914 and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1920 with Poems 1909-1920. Following it up in 1921 with Music Lyrical and Narrative Poems. His poem Last Hours was set to music by Ivor Gurney. It was in the 1920s that Freeman, a friend of Haines was to write a postscript on the reverse of an envelope containing a letter from Freeman to Haines, seeking a meeting with Ivor Gurney when he was then in the mental hospital. There is no evidence, that I have found, that the meeting ever took place.
So here is a host of connections all much in evidence in these volumes, mingling poetic thoughts and words. These volumes, with their interlinked connections, with or without jackets, and in whatever edition, will be sure to warm any chilly evening whilst the reader dips into them.
