The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air

Poetry to carry in a coat pocket and read on a walk: songs, ballads, and country verse chosen by Edward Thomas for people who wanted their reading out of doors.

First published in 1907, The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air is an anthology rather than a gathering of Thomass own work. He was then a hard-pressed literary critic and prose writer in his late twenties, and he chose for company rather than for the classroom, setting old songs and ballads beside living writers: A. E. Housman, W. H. Davies, John Masefield, Alfred Noyes, Walter de la Mare, T. Sturge Moore, and W. B. Yeats.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was born in Lambeth to Welsh parents and did not begin the poems he is now remembered for until 1914; he was killed at Arras in April 1917. This anthology belongs to the earlier, prose-writing part of his life, and it stayed in print for more than forty years afterwards, an editors portrait of the countryside he would soon write about in verse of his own.