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.

Chpater 4 argues that an account of causation in terms of quasi-inertial processes and interferences handles problematic cases of pre-emption and overdetermination better than rival accounts. It also explains why and how the causal relations fail to be transitive.

In this chapter, I introduce the topic of negative action. I provide a rough account of the distinction between positive and negative actions, of the distinction between two commonly-discussed kinds of negative behaviour (omitting and refraining), and of what distinguishes negative actions from mere failures to do something. Then, drawing on this discussion and the discussion of Chapter 1, I articulate the problem of negative action: negative actions seem to be genuine actions; actions seem to be events; but (at least some) negative actions seem to be, not events, but absences thereof. I trace the widespread acceptance of the latter claim to Deflationism, the view – often held only implicitly – that negative action sentences express negative existentials.

In this chapter, I provide two positive arguments in favour of my sophisticated Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences and against the Deflationist alternative. I argue that my view can accommodate a range of data about the behaviour of adverbs in negative action sentences and their interaction with perceptual locutions, which Deflationism can’t. Thus, we can solve the problem of negative action by rejecting Deflationism, and with it the thought that (at least some) negative actions aren’t events. Instead, we should claim that negative actions are simply events which play the ensuring role. I close by comparing my view to two recent alternatives.

In this Introduction, I briefly sketch 'the problem of negative action', which I will be concerned, in the remainder of the book, to explore and to solve. I also provide a sketch of the book as a whole, and provide a brief defense of my methodology.

I pull together the main threads of the book, showing how the arguments of the previous chapters allow us to solve the problem of negative action by rejecting (PNA 3).