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Here is a ‘near impossible task’ indeed – to identify ‘the nation’s favourite poem about the countryside’.

Hmmm. The National Trust might be a little more honest about it – rather it’s an attempt to get National Trust-supporting types to make a choice from a highly contentious shortlist drawn up by a poet with an agenda, in order to draw attention to the National Trust and its properties. It might indeed ‘raise awareness of poems about the countryside’ – along with the blood pressure of many poetry lovers – but it certainly won’t identify the ‘nation’s favourite’; that would be to ‘play the same old records’, so all the likeliest candidates have been omitted from the list. No Shakespeare or Betjeman indeed – or Larkin come to that – no Milton or Herrick or Cowper, and none of the big-hitting Romantics; but what is truly inexcusable is that in a list that includes John Davidson and Ivor Gurney, there’s nothing of the greatest 20th-century poet of the English countryside, Edward Thomas – not even this, which would probably (and deservedly) win in an open contest…

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.