R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography

By Daniel Westover

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) is the most recognizable literary figure in twentieth-century Wales. His controversial politics and public personality made him a cultural icon during his life, and the merits of his poetry have continued to be debated in the years after his death. Yet these debates have too-often circled familiar ground, returning to the assumed personality of the poet or to the received narrative of his experience. Even the best studies have focused almost exclusively on ideas and themes. As a result, the poetry itself has frequently been marginalized. This book argues that Thomas’s reputation must be grounded in poetry, not personality. Unlike traditional literary biography, which combines historical facts with the conventions of narrative in an attempt to understand the life of a literary figure, this stylistic biography focuses on the essential relationship between the maker and the made object, giving priority to the latter. R. S. Thomas began his career by writing sugary, derivative lyrics inspired by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, yet he ended it as a form-seeking experimentalist. This study guides the reader through that journey, tracing Thomas’s stylistic evolution over six decades. In so doing, it asserts a priority: not to look at poetry, as many have, as a way of affirming existing notions about an iconic R. S. Thomas, but to come to terms with the tensions within him as they reveal themselves in the tensions – rhythmic, linguistic, structural – of the poetry itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783162895

Daniel Westover

Daniel Westover is an award-winning poet and literary critic specializing in the English language poetry of Wales. He is currently Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature at East Tennessee State University.

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R. S. Thomas

Writing Wales in English

CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies

General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (CREW, Swansea University)

This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW’s Honorary Associates. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

Other titles in the series

Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)

Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)

Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)

Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)

Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)

Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)

Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)

Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)

Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist? (978-0-7083-2217-8)

Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)

M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3)

Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)

R. S. Thomas

A Stylistic Biography

Writing Wales in English

DANIEL WESTOVER

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2011

© Daniel Westover, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available form the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2413-4 (hardback)

          978-0-7083-2411-0 (paperback)

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-289-5

The right of Daniel Westover to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988

Drawing of R. S. Thomas by Mildred Eldridge (his wife, Elsi), 1939. By permission of The R. S. Thomas Study Centre and Archives and Special Collections at Bangor University, and with kind permission of Gwydion Thomas.

For Mary, Eden and Branwen

C

ONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Origins of a Style, 1936–1943

2 A Style Emerging, 1943–1955

3 A Style Defined, 1955–1972

4 A Style Developed, 1972–1988

5 A Style (Un)Refined, 1988–2000

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

G

ENERAL

E

DITOR’S

P

REFACE

The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature’s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English worldwide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.

M. Wynn Thomas

CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales)

Swansea University

A

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the generosity of a number of individuals and organizations. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Professor Tony Brown for his friendship, depth of knowledge, patience and advice. Tony was generous to me long before I came to study in Wales, and I am deeply grateful for his guidance. I would also like to thank Professor M. Wynn Thomas, general editor of this series, for his thoughtful attention to the manuscript. Professor Ian Gregson and Dr Paul Westover also read the manuscript and offered valuable advice. Many thanks are due to Sarah Lewis at the University of Wales Press for the commitment and expertise she has exhibited throughout the process of shepherding my work into print. I express deep gratitude to my friend and mentor, Dr John Wood, who many years ago introduced me to R. S. Thomas’s work, and who encouraged me in my inclination to pursue further studies in Wales. Thanks are also due to Morri Creech, who directed my graduate studies and spent many hours discussing prosody with me. I also wish to express my gratitude to other teachers who have inspired and encouraged me over the years: Sally Lake, Peter Makuck and the late Leslie Norris.

The nature of this study necessitated the inclusion of longer poetry quotations than might normally be expected in a work of criticism. Grateful acknowledgement for permission to quote from the work of R. S. Thomas is due to Gwydion Thomas, Kunjana Thomas and Rhodri Thomas, and to Dr Suzanne Fairless-Aitken at Bloodaxe Books.

The R. S. Thomas Study Centre at Bangor University provided access to a vast collection of research materials. The Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme (ORSAS) and an International Scholarship from Bangor University made it possible for me to study full-time in Wales. I am indebted to colleagues who offered feedback and advice as I presented and discussed early material from this book at the Annual Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (Gregynog, Wales, 2004), and I wish to express thanks to both the Association for Welsh Writing in English (AWWE) and the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH) for supporting and promoting valuable scholarship that continues to stimulate my own work.

I would especially like to acknowledge my parents, Kim and Pam Westover, and my wife’s parents, Ron and Kay McCormick; their support has in no small way made this book possible. My deepest gratitude, as ever, is to my wife, Mary, for her advice, care and encouragement.

Daniel Westover

April 2011

A

BBREVIATIONS

I am receiving various essays + reviews. I see some people are still nit-picking about my so-called lack of form. I wish they’d catch up … To me form is something much more than the look of the poem on the page. Form is a wide subject that needs wider treatment. I haven’t come across any, which doesn’t mean there isn’t.

R. S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick

Introduction

In the spring 1972 issue of Poetry Wales, which is dedicated to the work of R. S. Thomas, Harri Webb declares Thomas to be ‘Prifardd [chief bard] of English-speaking Wales’, the ‘successor’ to Dylan Thomas.¹ The landscape of R. S. Thomas’s Wales, Webb writes, is ‘a country in which it is necessary to be a man’ – a welcome contemporary counterbalance to the ‘too cosy’, childlike world of Milk Wood.² More specifically, Webb responds to Thomas’s cultural geography of Wales: ‘physical beauties … in ironic contrast to the lives of the people who have to live in it’; ‘The countryman [who] must work hard incessantly’; ‘small seaside towns [which] are sucker traps for seedy tourists’; and ‘natives too harassed by their daily cares to take any account of their past glories or future possibilities’.³ Unlike the romantic, nostalgic work of his namesake, R. S. Thomas’s poetry is ‘true to the facts’, reflecting ‘the weather of Wales today’; as a result, it ‘acquires a relevance that transcends purely literary merit’.⁴

Webb’s willingness to assign R. S. Thomas pre-eminence based on the apparent relevance and authenticity of his poetry is indicative of the degree to which Thomas’s socio-political stature has shaped discussions of his work.⁵ Feeling that his poetry ‘transcends purely literary merit’, critics have often focused on its extra-textual implications. This tendency is understandable, given the cultural position that Thomas consciously took in Wales, but it has meant that, ironically, even as the body of R. S. Thomas criticism has steadily grown, the poetry itself has increasingly been marginalized. Indeed, much writing has focused almost exclusively on the presumed personality of the poet, fashioning a cultural icon from the harsh, cloud-covered, tourist-infected Welsh soil of his early work. Such writing has created a critical context for Thomas’s poetry and has established his reputation, but it has also, with few exceptions, failed to engage with the styles and techniques of his poetry – its forms, registers, shapes and movements; in short, its prosody. One reason this matters so much is that in the absence of close reading, critics addressing the importance, and indeed the quality, of the poetry have had little on which to base their claims. To quote M. Wynn Thomas slightly out of context: ‘Until his poetry is thus put to the test … there can be no knowing precisely how good it is, or what its strengths and weaknesses are.’⁶

Webb seems to take for granted the ‘literary merit’ of Thomas’s poetry, but nearly four decades later, we can no longer afford to do so. Gwyn Jones once suggested that Thomas might be ‘the finest, conscious craftsman writing verse in English today’.⁷ However, more recently, Robert Minhinnick has written that Thomas ‘has been consistently overrated as a writer’.⁸ Such differences of opinion are to be expected in critical discourse, but in both cases one feels a similar lack of corroborating demonstration. This is also true of Andrew Duncan’s writing, which falls back on stereotypical adjectives to describe R. S. Thomas – ‘gruff, grumpy, comminatory, patriarchal’ – and makes broad declarations, such as ‘[Thomas’s] poetry is all moulded by political beliefs’ and ‘his work, though highly controlled, is undistinguished in style’.⁹ Duncan offers nothing in support of these claims. In fact, his most interesting assertion is one that, ironically, applies to his own writing: ‘Thomas’s gales of disapproval assume authority.’¹⁰ Duncan draws from popular caricatures of R. S. Thomas and his work and announces them as true. He also trades in sweeping denunciation, an approach that does not help us to evaluate or comprehend Thomas’s poetry – or, for that matter, Thomas himself.

Equally unhelpful, and perhaps more damaging, is criticism which heaps unqualified and unsupported approval on the poetry. One can celebrate R. S. Thomas as the pre-eminent religious poet of the modern age, or the greatest British poet since Wordsworth, or ‘Prifardd of English-speaking Wales’, or any number of the titles and accolades that critics have given him, but subject matter alone cannot make him great, just as celebrity cannot. In terms of literary history, what determines R. S. Thomas’s greatness, or lack of it, is his poetry. The primary purpose of this book, then, is to examine, and account for, the style and technique of the poems, and in so doing to evaluate existing critical positions. Extrinsic questions are of great consequence, but this study establishes their relationship to intrinsic questions, in particular questions of prosody.

By prosody, one has in mind all aspects of style and technique by means of which R. S. Thomas influences and directs our experience when reading a given poem. As Harvey Gross writes, ‘prosody and its structures … articulate the movement of feeling in a poem, and render to our understanding meanings which are not paraphrasable’.¹¹ Of course, that understanding is enriched by factors outside the literary text. A New Critical approach to Thomas’s work would be interesting but ultimately inadequate because it would ‘[exclude] any analysis of … conditions which make it possible for the text to exist’.¹² Materials con-textual (biography, geography, cultural environment) and extra-textual (poetic and critical theory) elucidate the prosody, which does not develop in a vacuum.

When considering the studies of R. S. Thomas to date, one finds that even the best have almost exclusively focused on ideas and themes. Thus we have many articles with titles like ‘R. S. Thomas and the Welsh hills’, ‘R. S. Thomas as priest-poet’, ‘R. S. Thomas and the hidden God’ and so on. In other words, much has been written to tell us what the poetry means, but little has been written that illuminates how it means by examining fundamental relationships between content and form. There are moments – a sentence here, a paragraph there – of stylistic discussion scattered throughout the criticism, and this book includes these moments as part of its own discussion. In recent years, there have also been a few critics who address Thomas’s style more specifically. M. Wynn Thomas, who calls attention to ‘the theology of Thomas’s style’, Damian Walford Davies, who examines Thomas’s various uses of puns, and David Lloyd, who explores Thomas’s formal responses to the American poet William Carlos Williams, are notable in this regard.¹³ However, there has been no extended study of any aspect of his prosody, and there has been nothing that attempts to account for his stylistic development.

As a result, this book is necessarily a pioneering expedition, one that seeks to begin a conversation, not conclude it. It is also of necessity broad in scope since R. S. Thomas published poetry for over six decades and, within that time frame, evolved dramatically as a stylist. He began as a sub-Georgian imitator, writing derivative nature lyrics in the manner of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, yet he ended his career as a form-seeking experimentalist. This book chronicles that developmental journey, analysing Thomas’s various prosodies, including metrical, accentual, linear and visual forms. What becomes clear along this trajectory is that the poet’s stylistic destinations more or less coincide with geographic ones: Chirk, Hanmer, Manafon, Eglwys-fach, Aberdaron, Rhiw. Indeed, one is continually aware that for R. S. Thomas there exists an integral relationship between prosody and place. Thus, each chapter discusses important stylistic developments in relationship to, and as products of, the environments in which they occur.

Perhaps most significantly, Thomas’s geographic journey was accompanied by an increasingly introspective one. As a result, his distinctive prosodies are nearly always extensions of his psychological interior. Consequently, in terms of its genre, this book can be called an exercise in stylistic biography. It interests itself in the poetic life, yet its premise is that R. S. Thomas cannot be adequately understood through interviews or prose writings, politico-cultural agendas, or spiritual and philosophical ideologies. These have too often distracted from his craft when they should, in fact, encourage closer reading since prosody frequently reveals what has not been, indeed cannot be, articulated. This book asserts a priority: not to look at poetry, as many have, as a way of affirming existing notions about an iconic R. S. Thomas, but to come to terms with the tensions within him as they reveal themselves in the tensions – rhythmic, linguistic, structural – of the poetry itself. In this way the poems will remain, as they must, the primary focus. The poems, after all, are what we have.

1

Origins of a Style, 1936–1943

The waters strive to wash away

The frail path of her melody,

This little bird across the lake

That links her gentle soul with me.

O wind and wave thou wilt not break,

Uncouth and lusty as thou art,

The light thread of this golden song

That shines so deep into my heart.¹

Hard as it may be to believe, these quatrains – with their easy rhymes, archaic diction and unvarying iambic tetrameter – are an early, untitled composition by R. S. Thomas. Sent to a publisher for consideration, they were rejected, and it is not hard to see why. In 1939, the likely year of submission (three years, it is worth noting, after the publication of Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse), the dust had long since gathered on the Georgians, the last group of poets to tolerate diminutive descriptions like ‘frail path’ and ‘little bird’, yet these were the very poets R. S. Thomas was imitating at the time.² Even if these quatrains had been penned during the decade of Edward Marsh’s anthologies, they would not have been very impressive.³ The poem’s diction – the pronoun ‘thou’, the adjectives ‘uncouth’ and ‘lusty’, the use of poetic apostrophe (particularly with the accompanying ‘O’) – was outmoded by 1912, let alone 1939; adjective-noun pairings like ‘gentle soul’ and ‘golden song’ were long since clichés; and the predictable, but ultimately vacuous, last line would have caused almost any critic, seventeen years after the publication of The Waste Land, to cringe. As Thomas later became aware,

You will take seriously those first affairs

With young poems, but no attachments

Formed then but come to shame you.

      (‘To A Young Poet’, BT, p. 11)

In truth, these 1939 quatrains represent a body of early work that the mature R. S. Thomas may have wished had never seen the light of day.⁴

However, the young Thomas sent his imitative quatrains into the world, and one is glad of it, for it would not do to begin a developmental study of his prosody by examining the relatively mature writing he produced in Manafon during the 1940s and 1950s even if critics have often painted that work, particularly those poems featuring Iago Prytherch, as the genesis of R. S. Thomas. For example, John Powell Ward begins his book-length, chronological study of Thomas’s career with a discussion of the ‘great many poems on the Welsh peasant and hill farmer’, even going so far as to call Song at the Year’s Turning (1955) Thomas’s ‘first book’.⁵ Ward’s treatment of Thomas’s poetry was pioneering, and it retains its relevance even in the face of newer scholarship, but his narrative does not begin at the beginning. While Song at the Year’s Turning was Thomas’s first volume to be published in London and, therefore, the first to exact attention from English critics, it was in reality his fourth published book.⁶ In fact, Thomas was publishing in respected journals as early as the late 1930s. His earliest offerings, to be sure, are derivative and unsophisticated when compared with poems written at Manafon, but that fact is itself important to an understanding of his work. For example, Dilys Rowe, in her review of The Stones of the Field (1946), shrewdly points out how ‘The poetry … in these days of head-long half-clothed rushes, comes decorously into print, poised and far advanced in a poet’s development’.⁷ Of course, with Thomas’s career now whole, one can see that The Stones of the Field was far from the apex of his progression, but Rowe was right: R. S. Thomas’s style had developed significantly by 1946.

In analysing Thomas’s poetic development, one quickly becomes aware that the style of his poems was tied to the changing substance of his emotions. In fact, one does not need to read much R. S. Thomas to ascertain that the primary catalysts for his stylistic development were anxiety, resentment and a perpetual sense of instability, amounting to what we will call a ‘troubled muse’. ‘Hate takes a long time / To grow in’, he writes in Tares (1961), his first post-Manafon volume, ‘and mine / Has increased since birth’ (‘Those Others’, p. 31). These lines point to an inner conflict that has been a lifetime in the making. Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas write of ‘the tensions … that hurt R. S. Thomas into verse’.⁸ Sources of ‘hurt’ and ‘hate’ evolved and expanded over the years, taking in a number of related issues, including an insecure sense of self, an antipathy to the dehumanizing modern world and a complex relationship with an impersonal God. But much of the conflict that ‘made’ R. S. Thomas was manifestly affecting him years before he arrived in Manafon, and it was also affecting his style. Manafon was his first stylistic destination, an important one, but one of many at which the poet arrived, and from which he would write, before eventually setting off again.

By initially focusing on the years Thomas spent as a curate in the English-speaking border parishes of Chirk, Denbighshire (1936–40) and Hanmer, Flintshire (1940–2), one does not wish to understate the jolt Manafon and its resident hill farmers gave his sensibilities or the developments they prompted in the poetry. But something happened on the road to Manafon, something that, between 1939 and 1942, knocked the Georgianism out of R. S. Thomas and simultaneously ‘[created] a fundamental sense of insecurity and mistrust’ within him.⁹ That interim, neglected though it may be, is fruitful ground. The origins of R. S. Thomas the stylist, the prosodist, in short the poet of originality, are there for the finding.

DEW ON THE MUSHROOM

          When I was a child,

innocent plagiarist,

there was dew on the early-morning

mushroom, as there is not now. (ERS, p. 75)¹⁰

Reading R. S. Thomas, one comes to realize that a shadow of lost innocence casts itself on much of his writing. The childlike trust he placed in nature and in God felt the sting of war and the accompanying drone of modernity in the 1940s, and the resulting wounds never really healed. Indeed, much of his work can be seen as a search to re-establish that lost innocence and sense of unity, a longing for that which is simple and ultimately unselfconscious. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Thomas was not yet weighed down by ‘the new world, ugly and evil’ (‘no Through Road’, SYT, p. 115). He was still ‘ignorant of the blood’s stain’ (‘Song for Gwydion’, AL, p. 9). Living in rural Wales, he avoided much of the shock of modernity of which Britain and its literary landscape felt the impact in the early part of the twentieth century. Writing of his youth and adolescence, Thomas points on several occasions to a particular experience – that of mushroom gathering – to symbolize what he saw as a purer time:

One of the most enjoyable times of the year in Holyhead was the mushroom-picking season … those early mornings were full of magic. Have you ever touched cold mushrooms, wet with dew, smelt their freshness, and tasted them? … They have a vaguely cheesy taste … which disappears in the frying-pan, no matter how careful you are.¹¹

From an early age, Thomas found his inspiration in the natural world, and in both poetry and prose these dew-touched mushrooms are a microcosm of that world: fresh, ripe, unspoiled, but also vulnerable and elusive. Such ‘mornings full of magic’ bring to mind Hopkins’s ‘Goldengrove’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘green and golden’ days. But golden groves ‘unleave’, and, as Dylan Thomas reminds us, ‘the sun … is young once only’.¹² In this retrospective prose passage from The Echoes Return Slow (1988), R. S. Thomas articulates an inevitable loss. His innocence was to ‘disappear in the frying-pan’ of the 1940s. That final phrase – ‘no matter how careful you are’ – is significant. Thomas grew up away from industry and technology. He deliberately lived and worked in rural parishes rather than towns. But there was no avoiding modernity. Welcome or not, it would dry the magic from those cold mornings, and it would demand poetic expression.

Thomas’s early style mimics writers whose work reflects a similar innocence. His early exposure to poetry was limited to F. T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the obligatory Georgian verses he studied at school in Holyhead. For its part, The Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and periodically updated in various editions, was an old-fasioned anthology even by the 1920s.¹³ It is not clear which edition R. S. Thomas would have encountered, but from 1909 to 1929 The Golden Treasury, no longer edited by Palgrave (who died in 1897), remained more or less unchanged in its various editions so that, for example, the only post-1900 poet to be included in the 1923 edition was Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), hardly a Modernist. Thus, while his familiarity with The Golden Treasury gave Thomas a solid background in accentual-syllabic prosody (Shakespeare, Milton and Keats were prominently featured in every edition), it also confined his exposure to the particular breed of poems favoured by Palgrave, who unabashedly excluded any poem that was ‘too long, unrhymed (or written in heroic couplets), narrative, descriptive, didactic, humorous, erotic, religious, occasional, or overly personal’.¹⁴ These exclusions limited the anthology to short songs and nature lyrics that, by the time R. S. Thomas was being influenced by them, should have seemed antiquated. In an audio recording, Thomas speaks about his introduction to poetry, and of his first attempts at writing it:

In the late twenties, at a time when