Thomas and Frost as Eco-Poets - our 2026 edition of 'Friends across the Pond'

Thomas and Frost as Eco-Poets

Nature, observation and our place in the living world

A transatlantic round-table exploring nature, observation and our place in the living world

What can two writers born in the nineteenth century tell us about our relationship with the natural world today?

Join Edward Thomas Fellowship and Robert Frost Society regulars Edna Longley, Guy Cuthbertson, Tom Durham, Robert Hass, Donald Sheehy and Brian Brodeur, together with our 2026 guest, scientist and Frost scholar Owen Sholes, and actor Gordon Clapp, for a transatlantic round-table conversation hosted by Jeremy Mitchell.

Through readings from the prose and poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, we will explore the extraordinary powers of observation that shaped their writing and ask how they understood the relationship between people, place and the other inhabitants of the natural world.

“We notice traits of nature – that’s all we do.” — Robert Frost

For both writers, looking closely mattered. Frost saw the nature poet and natural scientist as close relations through their shared habit of “fresh noticing”. Thomas wrote of discovering through nature our own “position, responsibilities and debts” among the other inhabitants of the earth.

Beginning with the simple act of going outdoors, looking and noticing, our conversation will move through birds, moths and butterflies, woods and water, houses and human habitation; landscape and environmental change; weather and the inner life; and our relationship with other species.

Along the way we will encounter familiar and less familiar writing, including Frost’s The Pasture, To a Moth Seen in Winter, The Census-Taker, There Are Roughly Zones and The Oven Bird, alongside Thomas’s The Brook, House and Man, Rain, The Mountain Chapel, The Word and Out in the Dark.

Our journey will take us from observation and fresh noticing, through questions of dwelling and belonging, towards the way landscape and weather become part of our inner lives. Finally, Thomas and Frost confront us with larger questions about natural limits, other species and how much of the non-human world we can ever truly understand.

The round-table brings together literary scholars, poets, performers, scientists and enthusiastic readers, each approaching Thomas and Frost from a different perspective. It will be a conversation rather than a series of formal lectures, with readings and discussion throughout.

No specialist knowledge of either poet is needed. At its heart, this is an evening about two writers who looked extraordinarily closely at the world around them—and about why, more than a century later, their words may have acquired a new relevance, and perhaps a new urgency, for us today.

Thomas’s words in wood

Edward Thomas’s close observation of the natural world continues to inspire artists today.

The Edward Thomas Fellowship’s three sets of notecards bring together Thomas’s poetry and prose with specially commissioned wood engravings by contemporary artists. Several of the works represented have particular resonance with the themes of this evening, including Out in the Dark, It Rains and extracts from The South Country.

The Fellowship has also published Words into Wood, a fine-art limited-edition volume bringing together eighteen Thomas poems and specially commissioned contemporary wood engravings printed from the artists’ original blocks.

The notecards and a few remaining copies of Words into Wood are available from the Edward Thomas Fellowship and the Edward Thomas Centre at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery. For further information on these items, and how to purchase, please visit the Edward Thomas Fellowship and select appropriate pages from the side menu - https://edward-thomas-fellowship.org.uk/