Before moving to Bristol in 2007, he held a chair at Cardiff University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge where he was Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Teaching Fellow at Corpus Christi. Pite was Director of Bristol's Institute for Advanced Study (2013-17). His research focusses on literature's contribution to addressing the environmental emergency, both contemporary poetry in the European languages and writing from the past. His new book, Edward Thomas's Prose: Truth, Mystery, and the Natural World, and his study of Frost are part of that inquiry. He is now developing a reading of Romantic period literature and water-based industrial development.
Pite applied the “Page 99 Test” to Edward Thomas's Prose and shared the following:
On page 99 you find the conclusion to my book’s discussion of Beautiful Wales, written by Thomas in 1905, followed by just the first few sentences introducing his next publication, The Heart of England.Learn more about Edward Thomas's Prose at the Oxford University Press website.
My analysis of Beautiful Wales ends by looking at the book’s closing passage – a landscape set at night in a graveyard beside a river, which runs beside an unnamed Welsh town. (The setting is evidently based on Pontarddulais, which stands on the coast of South Wales between Swansea and Carmarthen). Thomas was making his living at the time through journalism, and he'd written about this graveyard in a review two years before. So, as elsewhere in the study, I compare Thomas’s writing in a book with an earlier newspaper article.
According to Beautiful Wales, the past does endure in the country’s landscapes – Welsh identity has not been erased by English power (whether industrial, cultural, or linguistic). Its presence is muted, however — and much more so than it appears to be in the review. Hence, the Welsh Revival, taking place when Thomas was writing, cannot straightforwardly bring the past back to life. The past is definitely there but it's not necessarily recoverable. In a sense, it resists appropriation. This perception and the perspective it leads to are, I suggest, the distinctive achievements of Beautiful Wales.
The Heart of England (I then go on to say) seeks the same discovery of the mysterious and elusive but genuine past that lies within the English countryside. England, though, is for Thomas a different proposition from Wales because the past you will find there, if you search truthfully, will be at odds with the image of stability and order which you are probably looking for – which the ‘Englishness’ of the time and its highly patriotic 'nature writing' were seeking to affirm.
Does page 99 give a reader a good sense of the book as a whole?
I’m not sure it’s the page I would choose when introducing a reader to the book because it builds on a run of examples from the preceding few pages. What I’m trying to say about Beautiful Wales might be hard to be sure of, in isolation and out of context. The page does, on the other hand, give a good flavour of the study : it shows that I’m interested in Thomas’s prose work (which is, to most readers, only marginal to his poetry) and that I’m making claims for its sophistication and subtlety. The page indicates too the chronological structure of the work – that I’m looking for continuity and development across Thomas’s career as a prose writer (which lasted very nearly twenty years, whereas he wrote poems for little more than twenty months). And, thirdly (most helpfully I think), the page brings to the fore Thomas’s loyalty to Wales.
Thomas was born in London, lived in southern England all his life, and he did not speak any Welsh. His reputation is very much as a writer of England and Englishness. Both Thomas’s parents were Welsh, however, and Thomas visited cousins in Pontarddulais many times. His tutor in Oxford was a significant figure in the Welsh Revival. Beautiful Wales is, to my mind, such a considerable achievement because Thomas may bring to the project both his knowledge and his love of the country. Furthermore, he looks to establish through his prose in the book a balance – and a relationship – between knowledge and love, between objective fact and subjective experience. Discriminating between good and bad versions of that relationship formed a central aim of his work as a literary critic; finding the best version of it became the task he set himself as a creative writer.
So, in these ways, page 99 does open the door to key interests and concerns in my book. And, as often with concluding paragraphs, the writing is more ambitious than elsewhere – something like a peroration. I would rather someone came across that first, rather than a passage of bread-and-butter, expository academic writing. More than anything, since this is the underlying aim of the whole enterprise, I hope readers who know of Thomas as a poet might come away from the page encouraged to look again at his prose. His writing in this mode is full of riches and interest — and especially now. Our relationship to the natural world, which needs to be based on both love and knowledge combined, is in danger of breaking down. Thomas's prose, focussed as it is on the natural world and humanity's place in it, can help us find ways to restore that connection.
--Marshal Zeringue
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