Most of the writers discussed in this book shared Thomas's belief that poets and politicians who bang the drum for England simply deflect us from what it really is:

At a time of national crisis a true intimacy of speech was more necessary than ever. People needed to speak to and not at each other. England should not turn into a debating chamber. Hence, Thomas's distaste for the public intimacies of Rupert Brooke. Yet his own shyness might have struck earlier poets – Drayton, say, or Milton – as odd and even morbid. Isn't all poetry ‘for an audience’? For Thomas, the ‘audience’ is a snare and a distraction from his ‘England’, a realm stripped of all urbanity which he thinks of as ‘a place of innumerable holes and corners’. Not, that is, an England to be found on any official map.