Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be recognised as one of the great English poets of the 20th century.

Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as a 'war poet', he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war, and whose main subjects were the English countryside and its people, and the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.