The beautiful corner of Gloucestershire where poets who found fame gathered

If you see the words “daffodil” and “poetry” in the same sentence you might well think of William Wordsworth wandering about the Like District with his sister Dorothy and being confronted by a trumpeting host of golden blossoms.

But if you’ve been to a daffodil weekend in Dymock, or its near neighbour Kempley, then other poets may spring to mind. These annual events take place around the end of March when visitors can take guided tours to see meadows of wild daffodils. Along the way your tour guide will almost certainly tell the story of the Dymock Poets.

Between 1911 and 1915 a group of poets, some celebrated at the time, some who found fame later, gathered in the delightful corner of Gloucestershire that abuts Herefordshire. The half dozen men of letters who formed this writers’ colony produced a quarterly magazine titled New Numbers, which they dispatched to subscribers from Dymock Post Office. It was a journal that introduced a new style of poetry, along with poems that remain favourites to the present day.

Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” (If I should die think only this of me, That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England…) first appeared in New Numbers.

Brooke and John Drinkwater arrived in Dymock at the invitation of a fellow poet named Lascelles Abercrombie who lived at Ryton in a cottage named The Gallows. Not the most attractive name you might think, but it provided a peaceful setting for Mr Abercrombie to put pen to paper.

Soon to join this trio of poets was Wilfred Owen, who rented a thatched cottage nearby, then in the year that the First World War began their number was augmented by the American poet Robert Frost, plus his wife and children.

The sixth and last of the poets to find their way to Gloucestershire was Edward Thomas, a friend of Robert Frost. Thomas and his wife Helen set off from Paddington for far off Gloucestershire on June 23, 1914.

Just before noon the train stopped at a remote rural station three miles to the east of Stow on the Wold that served the village of Adlestrop and surrounding area. Edward looked out of the window, took a notebook from his jacket pocket and jotted down a few words.

Three years later Thomas’s poem Adlestrop was published and it’s been one of the best known and loved works in the English language ever since.

Thomas was in Dymock with Frost on the day the First World War was declared. And by the time Adlestrop was published Edward Thomas was dead, killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras.

Edward Thomas wasn’t established as a poet. On leaving Oxford he decided to make a living from his pen, but his efforts didn’t meet with immediate success.

He had a novel published, though it hardly set the world of literature on fire. So to support his wife and their three children Thomas became a jobbing writer as a critic and book reviewer.

Though his own literary ambitions had largely eluded him, Edward Thomas championed the talent of others. Among them was W H Davies, who lived in Nailsworth. Titled the tramp-poet, Davies lived the life of a hobo in America and Britain. Thomas recognised his literary skills and, incidentally, arranged for a wooden leg to be made for Davies who had the misfortune to lose a limb in a railway accident.

Adlestrop railway station closed in 1966. Edward Thomas’s wife Helen died the following year.