In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

There were frequent journeys to Merthyr to lecture on behalf of the Ethical Society, and even a visit in 1906 to a National Eisteddfod in north Wales.

[8] Like his father before him, Edward Thomas continued throughout his life[9] to visit his many relatives and friends in Ammanford, Newport, Swansea and Pontardulais.

[10] Thomas also enjoyed a twenty-year friendship with a distant cousin, the teacher, theologian and poet, John Jenkins (Gwili), of the Hendy, just across the county border from Pontardulais.

[12] Such was the family’s connection to this part of Wales that three of Edward Thomas's brothers were sent to school at Watcyn Wyn’s Academy in Ammanford, where Gwili had become headmaster in 1908.

[18] Thomas worked as literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London and became a close friend of Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies, whose career he almost single-handedly developed.

By August 1914, the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire had become the residence of a number of literary figures, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson and Robert Frost.

To spare the feelings of his widow Helen, she was told the fiction of a "bloodless death" i.e. that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body.

[27] However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington written in 1936 (and discovered many years later in an American archive) states that in reality the cause of Thomas's death was being "shot clean through the chest".

After the war, Helen wrote about her courtship and early married life with Edward in the autobiography As it Was (1926); a second volume, World Without End was published in 1931.

Myfanwy later said that the books had been written by her mother as a form of therapy to help lift herself from the deep depression into which she had fallen following Thomas's death.

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again.

[41] East Hampshire District Council have created a "literary walk" at Shoulder of Mutton Hill in Steep dedicated to Thomas,[42] which includes a memorial stone erected in 1935.

A Study Centre dedicated to Edward Thomas, featuring more than 1,800 books by or about him collected by the late Tim Wilton-Steer, has been opened in Petersfield Museum.

[43] In 1918 W. H. Davies published his poem Killed in Action (Edward Thomas) to mark the personal loss of his close friend and mentor.

[45][46] Robert MacFarlane, in his 2012 book The Old Ways, critiques Thomas and his poetry in the context of his own explorations of paths and walking as an analogue of human consciousness.

[49] In December 2017 National Museum Cardiff displayed a sculptural installation by the Herefordshire artist Claire Malet depicting a holloway and incorporating a copy of Thomas's Collected Poems, open at 'Roads':