Add MS 44990

POEMS (62) OF PHILIP EDWARD THOMAS (d. 1917); 24 Dec. 1914- 24 May 1915. Autograph, with a few alternative drafts. Arranged chronologically. See also Brit. Mus. Quart., xii, 1937-1938, pp. 11-13, and, for a brief account of the beginning (in 1914) of Thomas's poetical activity, R.P. Eckert, Edward Thomas, 1937, pp. 150-151. All the poems were subsequently printed, the majority either as written here or with only slight alterations and the addition, where wanting (as in the majority), of titles, but a few were substantially revised before printing and of one poem (written 28, revised

31 Mar., f. 46) the cancelled earlier draft is the one printed. The following were first printed under the pseudonym 'Edward Eastaway':-f. 1 (in Thomas's anthology This England, 1915); ff. 9, 23, 75 (in Six Poems, 1916); the same three, with ff. 7, 10, 16, 38, 47, 57, 65 (in An Annual of New Poetry, London, 1917). All the poems appear in the two volumes posthumously published under Thomas's own name, Poems, 1917, and Last Poems, 1918. For a bibliography see R.P. Eckert, op. cit., pp. 185-277. Paper; ff. 77. Quarto. 1914-1915. Presented by the author's widow, Mrs Helen Thomas.