Prose

At the Yeoman's House When in 1947 the young writer Ronald Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of his writing life. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners and neighbours that were to enrich his life. At the Yeoman’s House is not merely a spellbinding fragment of autobiography, but also a fascinating picture of the history, topography, botany and folk-lore of...

Alan Clodd and the Enitharmon Press is a bibliography of works published under Clodd's Directorship.   Clodd was a bibliophile in the purest sense of the word. His personal collection was vast, and above all, his dedication to publishing high quality poetry books was second to none.

David Jones in the Great War The great modernist artist and poet David Jones grew up in Brockley, London. He finished art school in the summer of 1913, ready to pursue a career as an artist. But then Britain declared war on Germany, and Jones joined the army. He was sent to France in 1915, serving in the same regiment as Robert Graves; unlike him, however, he was a private, a rank he kept throughout the war. Now, thanks to Thomas Dilworth's painstaking research, including scores of personal interviews, Jones's story can be told in detail. Accompanying the text are photographs of...

Celebrated by his peers for an intensity of vision that spoke to a generation devastated by war, the poet, prose writer and literary critic Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was only posthumously recognised for the scale of his achievements. At the age of thirty-nine he was killed in the Arras offensive on Easter Monday 1917, leaving behind a radiant body of work that explored the natural world, honoured rural tradition, challenged modernity, and contemplated mortality. Tracing the course of Thomas's life and that of his family and friends with numerous illustrations, this visual biography features photographs, printed material, maps and original letters, many...

An Epistle highlighting the relationship of Gascoyne and Ginsberg. This letter, written by David Gascoyne in 1986 as a contribution to a festschrift for his friend and fellow poet Allen Ginsberg was published in America that year. It was unknown in the UK when Roger Scott edited Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996 and for some years afterwards. Published to mark Gascoyne’s centenary in October 2016, it is an important document illuminating what was always a grey area in his biography: the visit Gascoyne made with Kathleen Raine and W. S. Graham to the USA in the autumn of 1951. Following in the footsteps of Dylan...

David Gascoyne’s international reputation rests on his outstanding achievement as poet and translator. The publication of his Selected Prose in his 82nd year was an event of major literary significance. Reading this remarkable collection, the harvest of some sixty years, which includes long-inaccessible contributions to journals and magazines together with previously unpublished material, we can appreciate for the first time the breadth and consistent quality of Gascoyne’s elegant and eloquent prose writings. They reflect his continuing engagement with the changing context of his times, and his close involvement with and response to luminary figures in twentieth-century art and literature.  

David Gascoyne’s Paris Journal 1937/9 was acclaimed by the critics when we published it in 1978; by a remarkable coincidence an earlier long-lost journal has also come to light for the period immediately preceding the former one. For this new journal the author has written a long introduction describing among much else his involvement with Mass-Observation and an account of his visit to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Also reprinted for the first time are his only published short story Death of an Explorer, and his essay on the Russian philosopher Léon Chestov.  

David Gascoyne's classic text of 1935 was the first comprehensive work on Surrealism to be published in English. His membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them André Breton, Paul Eduard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí - placed him in the ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost writers and artists. David Gascoyne lived in France in 1937-39, 1947-8 and 1953-64, during which time he became one of the most distinguished of British poets and translators. His other Enitharmon books include Selected Poems, Selected Verse Translations, Selected...

In July 1943 the young Welsh poet and soldier Alun Lewis, already recognised as one of the outstanding writers of his generation, arrived on sick leave at the house near Madras of Freda Aykroyd, a devotee of literature and the wife of a British scientist. Lewis and Aykroyd fell in love instantly, recognising in each other similar temperaments and artistic interests. Their affair, which lasted until Lewis’s mysterious death on the Arakan Front in March 1944, inspired some of the finest of his wartime poems as well as an extraordinary cache of letters published here for the first time. The...

Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric A hundred years ago Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras (April 1917). The reputation of his poetry has never been higher. Professor Edna Longley has already edited Thomas’s poems and prose. She now adds to the growing field of Thomas studies, with this close reading of Thomas's 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. Thomas,...

Michael Longley’s prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his (often combative) youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry. Among the poets Longley discusses are Homer, Propertius, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, James Wright, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ruth Stone. Sidelines, which includes interviews with Longley, not only illuminates his...

Edward Upward: Art and Life Upward (1903-2009), a novelist and short story writer, is famous for being the unknown member of the W. H. Auden circle. However, he was revered by his peers – Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Spender – for his intellect, literary gifts and unswerving political commitment. His lifelong friendship with Isherwood was forged at school and university, so each regarded the other as the first reader of his work. At Cambridge they invented the bizarre village of Mortmere, which with its combination of reality and fantasy had an important role in shaping the dominant British literary culture of...

Branch-Lines When Edward Thomas died in the First World War, very few of his poems had been published, but he is now recognised as one of the finest and most influential poets of the last century. Although often referred to as ‘a poet’s poet’, his writing has an almost universal appeal. He wrote accessibly, on traditional themes – the natural world, human relationships, transience and mortality. And yet his poetry is alive with the critical intelligence that came from years of writing non-fiction and reviewing verse. Branch-Lines captures the range of Thomas’s achievement, not least by combining poetry with prose. In this...

Edward Thomas’s stories formed an important stage in his imaginative development, and constitute a significant achievement. His fiction includes stories reflecting his personal quest for spiritual and social values, which have considerable psychological interest; and versions of traditional Celtic and Norse tales and English proverbs. In both original and traditional tales Thomas explores the relation between the human world and the realm of nature. His stories were, as he said, written under a ‘real impulse’, and they represent his whole effort to shape imaginative responses to fundamental questions of life and death, the self, and reality. The Ship of Swallows...

A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This new selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together they represent a lifetime of achievement in modern literature.  

The rediscovery of Edward Upward’s work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published The Mortmere Stories, An Unmentionable Man and a revised version of Journey to the Border. The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the Times Literary Supplement has described as Upward’s ‘unique perfected style . . . that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'  

These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward’s...

An Unmentionable Man is a collection of short stories. The first four of these short stories by Edward Upward, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies 'The Railway Accident' and Journey to the Border, both published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, 'Fred and Lil' is straightforwardly realistic and humbly sympathetic, while 'With Alan to the Fair' deals with love, hate and political extremism in...

This checklist is a bibliography of Enitharmon Press publications produced during the Directorship of Stephen Stuart-Smith from the first year of his appointment, until 2002.    

Denton Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Denton Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much...