Edward Thomas’s IN PURSUIT OF SPRING Part One: From Clapham to Salisbury

The Curiously Specific Book Club

In 1913, Edward Thomas had not yet written a line of poetry, but on Good Friday he set off on a bicycle journey from his parents’ home in south London to the Quantock Hills of Somerset. He intended to write a book, the kind of ‘country notes’ affair he had turned his hand to before, but what resulted was something extraordinary – a book-length piece of prose which, at times, reads like verse. We follow the route he took, beginning in Clapham and discovering how much some of the places he rode through have changed, and how little others. On the way, we read Thomas’s most famous poem, ‘Adlestrop’, on a railway station, hear our first chiffchaff, and find the special place which Thomas described with such power that his friend Robert Frost told him he was, in fact, already a poet.

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