‘the wind and I | Between us shared the world’: Reading Edward Thomas from a Daoist, Ecocritical Perspective

Abstract

Extant scholarship offers much insight into the twentieth-century British writer Edward Thomas; but his work has not yet been examined through an Eastern lens. This article situates Thomas's poetry within a Daoist, ecological framework. Recent scholarship explores the usefulness of Daoism, a Chinese philosophy established prior to the Qin period (221 BC), to contemporary ecocriticism, which my discussion extends. I draw Daoist parallels with Thomas's portrayal of nature as an impartial, merciless force, and his speakers partially relinquishing worldly desires. In addition to revealing international, ecological resonances of Thomas's poetry, this critical paradigm invites Daoist approaches to other Western writers.