A hundred years ago Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras (April 1917). The reputation of his poetry has never been higher. Edna Longley has already edited Thomas's poems and prose. She now marks his centenary, and adds to the growing field of Thomas studies, with this close reading of his poetry. Longley places the lyric poem at the centre of Thomas's poetry and of his thinking about poetry. Drawing on Thomas's own remarkable critical writings, she argues that his importance to emergent 'modern poetry' has yet to be fully appreciated.