This chapter examines Morris’s role and impact in the emergence of the movement from the 1880s onwards. Many of his ideas were developed by the next generation, ironically at a time when Morris was losing faith in his early passions. Young architects including Ashbee, Gimson and Lorimer met Morris, became involved in organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and played a role in setting up the Art Workers’ Guild and other new groups. There was a real enthusiasm for communal art. Craft workshops were set up, initially in cities, with the Cotswolds emerging as the movement’s first and major rural centre. The main driver was the idea of hands-on learning by doing, both in a workshop setting and in art schools. Morris’s success as a pattern designer ensured that this aspect of his work continued to inspire others, as did his passion for a beautiful house and a beautiful book. His emphasis on art for all also saw the emergence of opportunities for amateur arts. Morris’s legacy was widely acknowledged in Britain and beyond after his death, helped by the efforts of his daughter May in editing her father’s writings.

The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was all written during the First World War, but that war is frequently absent.He is an unusual war poet: an ‘Arts and Crafts’ war poet; a war poet who is focused on home but nonetheless committed to action and engagement with the world; a modern poet at home in the old wars and with the old tunes; a war poet of peacefulness.Thomas’s poetry addresses the war in its own way, directly and indirectly, with its own inclusive, hesitant, honest voice.We can see the uniqueness of his approach by looking at poems like ‘Adlestrop’, ‘The Manor Farm’, ‘The Combe’, ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’, ‘The Owl’, ‘A Private’, ‘Digging’ and ‘Tears’.Thomas said of war poetry that ‘No other class of poetry vanishes so rapidly, has so little chosen from it for posterity’, but his own survived, and not simply because it contained very little of the war.

For the Elmhirsts, the arts offered a source of unity in an age of division and fragmentation, and they initiated diverse programmes at Dartington in drama, dance, music, arts education, film, crafts and the visual arts to further their unitive vision. The tensions that arose in the course of these activities echoed wider debates about the role of creativity in society: between modernist ‘formalist’ art – eschewing any social or historical meanings – and avant-garde ‘functionalism’ that worked to restore the integration of art and life; between the craftsman-controlled, unified production process and more commercially-oriented notions of the relation between art and industry; and over what type of community art was intended to unify – the local ‘folk’, the nation, or a harmonious, global society. The difficulty in finding a coherent policy for the arts meant that the Elmhirsts gradually gravitated away from making the estate itself a replicable model for how the arts should unite society, and towards it contributing to government-led initiatives instead.