THOMAS, R(onald) S(tuart)

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Nationality: Welsh. Born: Cardiff, Glamorgan, 29 March 1913. Education: County School, Holyhead; University College, Bangor; St. Michael's College, Llandaff; University of Wales, Cardiff, B.A. in classics 1935. Family: Married Mildred Eldridge in 1940; one son. Career: Ordained deacon, 1937, priest, 1937: curate of Chirk, Denbigh, 1936–40; curate of Hanmer, Flintshire, 1940–42; rector of Manafon, Montgomery, 1942–54; vicar of St. Michael's, Eglwysfach, Denbigh, 1954–67, and of St. Hywyn, Aberdaron, with St. Mary, Bodferin, 1967–78; rector of Rhiw, with Llanfaelrhys, 1972–78. Awards: Heinemann award, 1955; Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 1964; Welsh Arts Council award, 1968, 1976; Cholmondeley award, 1978; Lannan Lifetime Achievement award for poetry, 1996. Address: Sarn-y-Plas, Y Rhiw, Pwllheli, Gwynedd, Wales.

Publications

Poetry

The Stones of the Field. Carmarthen, Druid Press, 1946.

An Acre of Land. Newtown, Montgomeryshire Printing Company, 1952.

The Minister. Newtown, Montgomeryshire Printing Company, 1953.

Song at the Year's Turning: Poems 1942–1954. London, Hart Davis, 1955.

Poetry for Supper. London, Hart Davis, 1958; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1961.

Judgement Day. London, Poetry Book Society, 1960.

Tares. London, Hart Davis, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1961.

Penguin Modern Poets 1, with Lawrence Durrell and Elizabeth Jennings. London, Penguin, 1962.

The Bread of Truth. London, Hart Davis, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1963.

Pietà. London, Hart Davis, 1966.

Not That He Brought Flowers. London, Hart Davis, 1968.

Pergamon Poets 1, with Roy Fuller, edited by Evan Owen. Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1968.

Postcard: Song. N.p., Fishpaste, 1968.

The Mountains. New York, Chilmark Press, 1968.

H'm. London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1972.

Selected Poems 1946–1968. London, Hart Davis MacGibbon, 1973;New York, St. Martin's Press, 1974.

What Is a Welshman? Llandybie, Dyfed, Christopher Davies, 1974.

Laboratories of the Spirit. London, Macmillan, 1975; Boston, Godine, 1976.

The Way of It. Sunderland, Ceolfrith Press, 1977.

Frequencies. London, Macmillan, 1978.

Between Here and Now. London, Macmillan, 1981.

Poet's Meeting. Stratford-upon-Avon, Celandine, 1983.

Later Poems: A Selection. London, Macmillan, 1983.

The Poems of R.S. Thomas. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1985.

Destinations. Stratford-upon-Avon, Celandine, 1985.

Experimenting with an Amen. London, Macmillan, 1986.

Selected Poems 1946–1968. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Welsh Airs. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1987.

The Echoes Return Slow. London, Macmillan, 1988.

Three Poems. Child Okeford, Dorset, Words Press, 1988.

Later Poems: A Selection. London, Macmillan, 1989.

Mass for Hard Times. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1992.

Collected Poems, 1945–1990. London, Phoenix, 1993.

No Truce with the Furies. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1995.

R.S. Thomas. London, J.M. Dent, 1996.

Love Poems. London, Phoenix, 1996.

Other

Words and the Poet (lecture). Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1964.

Young and Old (for children). London, Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Selected Prose, edited by Sandra Anstey. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1983; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour.1984.

Ingrowing Thoughts. Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1985.

Neb. Caenorfon, Gwasg Gwynedd, 1985.

Pe Medrwn yr Iaith: Ac Ysgrifau Eraill. Abertawe, Christopher Davies, 1988.

Autobiographies. London, J.M. Dent, 1997.

Editor, The Batsford Book of Country Verse. London, Batsford, 1961.

Editor, The Penguin Book of Religious Verse. London, Penguin, 1963.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Edward Thomas. London, Faber, 1964.

Editor, A Choice of George Herbert's Verse. London, Faber, 1967.

Editor, A Choice of Wordsworth's Verse. London, Faber, 1971.

Editor, Between Sea and Sky: Images of Bardsey, by P. Hope Jones. Llandysul, Gomer, 1998.

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Critical Studies: In Welsh Anvil (Llandybie), 1949, 1952; in Critical Quarterly (Manchester), ii, 4, 1960; in A Review of English Literature (Leeds), iii, 4, 1960; in Anglo-Welsh Review (Pembroke Dock, Wales), xiii, 31, 1963; R.S. Thomas by R. George Thomas, London, Longman, 1964; R.S. Thomas issue of Poetry Wales (Llandybie), winter 1972; R.S. Thomas by William Moelwyn Merchant, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, and Mystic, Connecticut, Verry, 1979; Yeats, Eliot, and R.S. Thomas: Riding the Echo by A.E. Dyson, London, Macmillan, 1981; Critical Writings on R.S. Thomas edited by Sandra Anstey, Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1982;R.S. Thomas, Poet of the Hidden God: Meaning and Meditation in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas by D.Z. Phillips, London, Macmillan, 1986; The Poetry of R.S. Thomas by J.P. Ward, Bridgend, Glamorgan, Poetry Wales Press, 1987; Miraculous Simplicity, Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1992; The Page's Drift: R.S. Thomas at Eighty, Bridgend, Glamorgan, Seren, 1993; 'Texts against Chaos': Anglo-Welsh Identity in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas, Raymond Garlick, and Roland Mathias (dissertation) by Megan Sue Lloyd, University of Kentucky, 1993; The Religious Poetry of R.S. Thomas (dissertation) by Janice Darlene Peterson, University of Alberta, 1993; Approaches to the Study of R.S. Thomas's Selected Poems, 1946–1968 by Ellie Jones, Cardiff, National Language Unit of Wales, 1994; "Why the Most Famous Welsh Poet Writes in English" by Rosemary Markham, in Contemporary Review (Surrey, England), 264(1538), March 1994; R.S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Images of God Explored by Elaine Shepherd, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1996; "Through the Looking Glass: R.S. Thomas's The Echoes Return Slow As Poetic Autobiography" by David Lloyd, in Twentieth Century Literature (Hempstead, New York), 42(4), winter 1996; R.S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence by Elaine Shepherd, Houndmills, England, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1996; "Vernon Watkins and R.S. Thomas" by Dennis Brown, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, edited by Gary Day, London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; "Dualism and Theodicy in R.S. Thomas' Poetry" by Christine Meilicke, in Literature & Theology (England), 12(4), December 1998.

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Consciously or unconsciously, R.S. Thomas has taken on something of the mantle of an Old Testament prophet. That is why he was drawn early on to translate "The Cry of Elisha after Elijah" from the Welsh of Thomas Williams. But he has taken on only "something of the mantle," and the something is the prophetic tone and surge of the Hebrew prophets as mediated through the King James Version of the Bible. The other reason for his attraction to this poem of Williams is its ambiguity in the face of the mystery of God, which has become Thomas's lifelong theme: "Cold is my cry; our bond was broken … /My understanding is darkened, /It is no gain to inquire." His other theme is that of the natural world, for in the beginning Thomas was very much a Welsh Wordsworth: "Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, /Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud." "Michael" and "The Leech Gatherer" lie behind Thomas's "Iago Prytherch," and, as with Wordsworth, there is great identification with peasant and place in Thomas's early poems.

It has rightly been said that there is much bitterness in Thomas's poetry, whether against modern man ("He's a new man now, part of the machine, /His nerves of metal and his blood oil") or against the remnants of the agrarian folk of Wales like Iago Prytherch, with his "frightening … vacancy of mind." But what is not so frequently pointed out is the huge compassion for the hill people, the peasants and sheep farmers, in their lonely struggle for subsistence and even for those victims of the more contemporary world like the displaced young girl in "The Evacuee," who "grew, a small bird in the nest /Of welcome …" and whom "the men watched … and, nodding, smiled /With earth's charity, patient and strong." Stan Smith's claim that "this is pastoral poetry with a sour edge …" severely under-states the nature of the poetry of Thomas. The "sour edge" is everywhere in the details and images of the poetry: "Docking mangels, chipping the green skin /From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin /Of satisfaction …"; "… the table unlaid and bare /As a boar's backside." But one simply cannot say that Thomas's final plea for Iago Prytherch, so reminiscent of Roy Campbell's "The Serf"—"Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars, /Enduring like a tree under the curious stars"—is anything but a tribute to his universalizing compassion. The same is true of his "Death of a Peasant":

You remember Davies? He died, you know,
With his face to the wall, as the manner is
Of the poor peasant in his stone croft...

Yes, there is bitterness. His description of his own country and people is bitter:

There is no present in Wales,
And no future...
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

But such bitterness is no more the whole spirit of this poet than any single play gives the whole of Shakespeare.

As Richard Poole put it, commenting on the work of Thomas years after these early poems, "Here was the real thing—language with a tough directness of utterance and a thrilling beauty, and a voice at once personal and universal." This expresses the real poet in his wholeness. Thomas is a major poet because his genius is multifaceted and universal. He embraces politics, Welsh nationalism, the shortcomings of science and the materialism of the consumer society, and, above all, the long struggle with the problem of faith in the modern world. As the years have gone by, his work has grown ever more philosophical. Indeed, through his resorting to the great philosophers for help with the problems of faith and reality, he makes palpable in as concrete a way as possible the thorniest of abstractions. At the heart of his poetry, especially in his later years, is a relentless questioning.

Though a priest, Thomas is not a great religious poet in the tradition of, say, Herbert or Traherne or the biblical poet-prophets, for he does not, cannot, bear sufficient witness to the reality of God or the religious experience. As Robert Minhinnick has rightly said, "Dylan Thomas, pondering the estuarine splendours of his adopted home, gets tantalisingly closer to faith." Thomas, however, bears perpetual witness to the absence of God, the emptiness of Christ's churches, the constantly unanswered (as he sees it) cries of prayer. In truth his poetry reveals, more than anything, a hymn to doubt and the existential agony of modern man. Paradoxically, if he were not so profoundly honest, Thomas might settle for the cop-out of atheism: "I have heard the still, small voice /and it was that of the bacteria /demolishing my cosmos … /I am alone on the surface /of a turning planet"; and "He looked over /the world's edge and nausea /engulfed him" (from The Echoes Return Slow). In "Via Negativa" we read of "that great absence /In our lives, the empty silence /Within …"

Thomas has become the national monument of Anglo-Welsh literature, as many critics put it, an "icon." This in fact is how reviewer Glenda Beagan described him before going on to sum up: "Perhaps the vertiginous repulsion/fascination of the later poems could not have come about without that preliminary hard-core of rootedness in earth, those specifics of place, since, for matter to be recognised as the scaffolding of spirit, it must first be fully apprehended as matter in its own right." That, I think, is about right as a summing up of the vast, doubt-filled corpus of this major and, if not "religious," certainly spiritually obsessed poet.

—William Oxley