"If it bleeds, it leads" is not a maxim one typically associates with literary biography, but it vey much applies to Jean Moorcroft Wilson's new biography of Edward Thomas. Wilson opens with her discovery of evidence confirming that the death of the English poet—one of the forerunners of modernism, a friend of Frost, and an influence on Auden, Larkin, and many more—at the Battle of Arras in 1917 could not possibly have occurred in the absurd manner that had long been believed: his body found intact and unblemished after the battle, as though the spirit had been knocked out of him by the percussive shock of an explosion.
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