Poetry Extra: No One Left And No One Came

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Poetry Extra

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly opportunity for listeners to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

A brand new poetry slot on Radio 4 Extra gives listeners a weekly opportunity to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

Poetry Extra: No-One Left and No-One Came

No-One Left and No-One Came

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Poetry Extra, No-One Left and No-One Came

Daljit Nagra selects Edward Thomas's No-One Left and No-One Came.

Daljit Nagra selects Edward Thomas’ No One Left and No One Came and we hear the story behind the poem ‘Adelstrop’. From 2001.

Edward Thomas died exactly 100 years ago on the battlefields of the First World War. To commemorate that moment, BBC Radio 4's Poet in Residence, Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's radio poetry archive with Thomas's uneventful poem about inactivity and solitude 'No One Left and No One Came'.

In Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop a train stops, there's a hiss of steam, someone clears his throat and a blackbird sings. And that's it. Yet this 16 line poem is one of the best-loved in English, inspiring articles, pilgrimages to the Cotswold village and many other poems. Anne Harvey tells the story of how it came to be written and explores the fascination of a short poem in which nothing happens but which deals with large themes: memory, time, naming, sound - and fear.

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2001.

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