E.P. Thompson was the single most outstanding voice of heart and reason crying out against the obscenity and unreason of the Cold War. One of Britain's leading Marxist historians, E.P. Thompson re-wrote our concept of history in The Making of the English Working Class, and redefined the nature and possibilities of political protest in his essays and journalism, in books such as The Poverty of Theory and Writing by Candlelight, and in the polemical pamphlet Protest and Survive. The range and prodigality of his writing has been widely celebrated, but his poetry has received scant attention. Yet the very qualities which made his political writing so incisive and spellbinding are there in the poems: that luminous presence in the words of a man of searing honesty speaking to men and women in an English which is direct and real, sonorous and undebased. It is the same voice, whatever the form: the poet, the man and the style are one. In the poems, Thompson's vision encompasses tenderness and sardonic anger, rage and hatred, epic grandeur and grand wit as well as unconscious literary naivety.Unlike many on the Left with tin ears and concrete ideologies, Thompson the writer felt - all through his being - Eliot's passion for his sacred places, the absoluteness of his concern 'to purify the language of the tribe'. For Thompson as for Eliot, the language of history and the language of politics were one and the same. His poetry too renews old speech to keep it speakable.