Elected Friends : Robert Frost and Edward Thomas: To One Another

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913.

During the next four years, the two writers - Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist - formed one of the most important friendships between poets since that of Wordswoth and Coleridge.

Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War.

The story of Edward Thomas' turn to poetry, in fact, has been dominated by the account of Robert Frost's injunction: to break his existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody.

Thomas himself had already championed Frost's early work.

This volume presents the full record, arranged chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one another - their letters, poems and Thomas' review of Frost's first two books.

They reveal a warmth and charm that gives insight into the relationship between Frost and Thomas.