Edward Thomas will have been familiar with many of the lanes and pathways around Buriton and Petersfield.
Perhaps no poet since Wordsworth walked as far as Edward Thomas. Some days he covered just a handful of miles in a loop from his cottage in the East Hampshire Hangars, other times he would walk fifteen or twenty-five miles in a day.
For further distances he cycled - but he believed that the bicycle moved too quickly for him to pick out the kind of detail that would infuse his life's writing: the celandines on the grass verge, the honeysuckle in a hedgerow, the linnet in an elm tree?
Julia Mayo is an expert on local literary figures and her talk at the Buriton Village Association's Autumn Meeting (Thursday 22 October) will describe Thomas' complex and sometimes troubled life with the help of photos from family albums, his diaries and contemporary sources.
Born in 1878, Edward Thomas is commonly considered to be a war poet - although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences, and his career in poetry only came after he had already been a successful writer and literary critic.
He was quite an astonishingly prolific writer, of travel books, history and book reviews with one estimate suggesting that he wrote 1,900 reviews, containing more than a million words, at the rate of 'one review every three days for 14 years'. He published five books before he was 27 and between 1910 and the beginning of 1913, thirteen books appeared under his name.
His breakthrough into poetry came in September 1913 when he was already 36 and soon he had written a series of careful, beautiful poems - often drawn from the English countryside: inspired by the names of local plants, and herbs; and by the rain.
Thomas's decision to enlist for the First World War was perhaps influenced by this love for the countryside, perhaps motivated by a kind of rural patriotism. He joined the Artists' Rifles in July 1915, and continued to write poetry during training. He was sent to France in January 1917, where he read a positive review of his own poetry in the TLS but was killed by a shell at the Battle of Arras only a few weeks later ?
At the time of his death, his poems were largely unpublished but in the years since his death his work has come to be cherished for its rare, sustained vision of the natural world and as a 'mirror of England'.
The meeting is part of Buriton's occasional series of events relating to the First World War.
The meeting, which starts at 7.30pm on Thursday, 22 October, will be held in Buriton Village Hall and is open to all.
Entry is free of charge, but there will be a retiring collection and, as always, tea and coffee and homemade biscuits in the interval.
