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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

A poet's death. (Edit: nope, fiction.)

On Easter Monday, 1917, the first day of the Arras Offensive, he paused for a moment to fill his pipe. A shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart; he died without a mark on his body.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/edward-thomas

Thomas was an astonishing thing, an established literary critic who suddenly morphed into a great poet. All his poems were written in the three years before he died, and he kept getting better. The Other is hauntingly good: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239754. WWI famously killed many poets, but I wish Thomas hadn't been one of them. He had pure English in his veins, and I like him better than Frost.

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To spare the feelings of his widow Helen, she was told the fiction of a "bloodless death" i.e. that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body. However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington written in 1936 (and discovered many years later in an American archive) states that in reality the cause of Thomas' death was due to being "shot clean through the chest".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)#War_servi...

Still poetic in a meta kind of way.

Wow, thanks! Probably should have had that in the "too good to be true" box to begin with.

It's interesting what people like. I've never been able to identify well with WWI poets. This is a good example. It's clearly well-written: the opening stanza captures me and takes me back to times hiking, when you emerge from the trees and the sunlight. But the rest is just something I can't understand or identify with. Perhaps it was intended to feel alienating, but it doesn't make me feel anything, not even alienated. It's just there, a thing I'm not that interested in.

I'm not criticizing your taste, by the way: I think everyone is entitled to look for what they want in art. I'm just interested in what you see here.

For comparison, here are some poems I like:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/fools-errands

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-turning-ten/

If the main idea of the poem—a man who follows a strange version of himself through the countryside—doesn't resonate with you, then yeah there probably isn't much of interest there. But I find it haunting and mysterious.

Then there is the melody of the language and the original way he puts words together that sounds modern and old-fashioned at the same time. And how he can write about nature in a way that brings it to life, which is super rare—most nature writing is boring, and the way Thomas does it seems full of feeling, something that was about to fall out of modern poetry. And then it's just perfectly executed, except I wish he hadn't rhymed "mirth" with "earth".

To me that poem suggests a modernism that was possible but in the end never happened. I like Eliot and Pound, but their virtuosity is altogether different and they are far more detached and alienated. Of course we can't say what Thomas would have been like after WWI, which had a shattering effect on all art.

You're certainly right that we needn't all like the same things. Thanks for sharing those links. I admire the Elizabeth Bishop poem for its construction—it's clever how the middle lines all rhyme—but I'm somehow not convinced she means what she's saying. The Billy Collins poem is beautiful, though. Thanks!

But it doesn't have to necessarily make you identify with it at first glance.

I, for example, enjoy how the poem captivates with its poetic form and how it makes you search for meaning (in its parts and as a whole). I think just the prosody and the process of finding meaning in the poem are enjoyable enough to call it beautiful.

I'm not dang but this is how I feel about The Other.

Thank you for posting this. Fine work. I need to give it another read later, but for now, I find Thomas' iambs a little heavyweight. Every line has the same 4x(ba-DUM, ba-DUM) rhythm, with almost no variety. Frost has a lighter touch with meter.

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