‘He has no idea of proportion’, wrote an exasperated Edward Thomas to his friend Gordon Bottomley in 1906. Thomas was frustrated with his poetic discovery, W. H. Davies, a one-legged tramp and professional beggar who had paid for the publication of his own poems from his hostel in Southwark in 1905, and sent copies to leading reviewers. One had found its way to Thomas, who was, at first, stunned:

Finding in Davies the Wordsworthian simplicity and compactness he sought for his own writing, Thomas visited him in the doss-house and offered to co-rent with him a little cottage in Kent where they could both get on with their writing. Davies accepted, and the arrangement worked for a while until Davies found simple living in the country a little dull and gradually went back to writing (and, apparently, begging) in London to make ends meet. It was an amicable parting: Thomas continued to praise Davies's work highly for its simplicity and naturalness, but, as his mention of Davies's occasional ‘commonplace’ writing and his comment to Bottomley indicate, he also began to worry about the inconsistencies of Davies's ‘natural’ output.