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R.S. Thomas: Poetic Horizons

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R.S. Thomas: Poetic Horizons R.S. Thomas: Poetic Horizons Karolina Alicja Trapp Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 The School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne Produced on archival quality paper Abstract This thesis engages with the poetry of R.S. Thomas. Surprisingly enough, although acclaim for Thomas as a major figure on the twentieth century’s literary scene has been growing perceptibly, academic scholarship has not as yet produced a full-scale study devoted specifically to the poetic character of Thomas’s writings. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Instead of mining the poetry for psychological, social, or political insights into Thomas himself, I take the verse itself as the main object of investigation. My concern is with the poetic text as an artefact. The main assumption here is that a literary work conveys its meaning not only via particular words and sentences, governed by the grammar of a given language, but also through additional artistic patterning. Creating a new set of multi-sided relations within the text, this “supercode” leads to semantic enrichment. Accordingly, my goal is to scrutinize a given poem’s artistic organization by analysing its component elements as they come together and function in a whole text. Interpretations of particular poems form the basis for conclusions about Thomas’s poetics more generally. Strategies governing his poetic expression are explored in relation to four types of experience which are prominent in his verse: the experience of faith, of the natural world, of another human being, and of art. In the process, the horizons of Thomas’s poetic style are sketched, encompassing a lyrical verse which is also a verse given over to reflection. In this study, his poetry emerges as personal and based on individual experience; however, that experience is at the same time accorded a more universal dimension. By way of conclusion, the present thesis sets Thomas’s writing within the context of literary tradition, highlighting his connections with Romanticism, seventeenth-century poetry, Modernist verse, and other literary movements. This study highlights the fact that Thomas’s literary models are still poorly understood. Examinations of his poetics are important for a fuller understanding of the poet’s achievement in literary history. In offering the first overview of Thomas’s poetic strategies, this thesis lays the groundwork for such future explorations. Declaration This is to certify that (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is fewer than 100 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Karolina Alicja Trapp (2014) Acknowledgements I would like to express gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Deirdre Coleman and Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Their constructive advice and guidance were vital to the development of this project. The R.S. Thomas Study Centre at Bangor University provided access to much of the research material that has stimulated my thought. This thesis owes also a great deal to Professor Andrzej Zgorzelski, whose critical discussions of verse have long inspired me and proved formative in many ways. In a sense, he opened the door on the world of poetry for me. Closer to home, this thesis would not have come into being were it not for the encouragement from my family and friends. By listening readily, they helped me transform my tangled ideas into an organised argument that forms this thesis. Special thanks, however, are due to my husband, who gave me his unwavering support through all the ups and downs of a PhD project. Expressing fully my debt to him would be impossible. Table of Contents Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter 1: Faith and Experience ....................................................................................... 26 Chapter 2: On Nature ......................................................................................................... 65 Chapter 3: People in Experience ..................................................................................... 102 Chapter 4: The Experience of Art.................................................................................... 139 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 200 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 213 Abbreviations Abbreviations of Thomas’s works: AL An Acre of Land BHN Between Here and Now CP Collected Poems 1945-1990 CT Counterpoint CWS “The Creative Writer’s Suicide” F Frieze IT Ingrowing Thoughts LP Later Poems MHT Mass for Hard Times ML “Miraculous Lives” NTF No Truce with the Furies PBRV “Introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse” R Residues SF The Stones of the Field SPr R. S. Thomas: Selected Prose UP Uncollected Poems WIW What Is a Welshman? Other abbreviations: COCEL The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature OCEL The Oxford Companion to English Literature ODLT The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms OED The Oxford English Dictionary 1 Introduction And the mind, then, weary of the pilgrimages to its horizons (R.S. Thomas, “Cures” CP 529) Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external power a dominion over thoughts. If words be not . an incarnation of thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments . which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. (William Wordsworth, Prose Works 84-85) The motif of an ever-elusive horizon recurs with striking frequency throughout R.S. Thomas’s oeuvre. Its primary sense of boundary is expanded in his poetry by way of an underlying drive for an intellectual-cum-spiritual journeying, and for feeling, pushing and challenging diverse types of borders. The brims of orison, the confines of the human condition vis-à-vis the infinite Deity, the range of the speaker’s voice and the restrictions of grammar become some of the many tested horizons in what also constitutes Thomas’s forays to the bounds of language. For a poet, experience – whatever it may be – is always mediated verbally. In as much as Thomas communicates that experience in verse, his field of exploration is also a poetic one: at its origins, the journey is above all a search for appropriate expression.1 It is with 1 Thomas made this clear by constantly reminding us of the effort that the creative process involves, as he does in “Words and the Poet”: “In the act of composition every critical faculty of the poet is at 2 these basic horizons, poetic horizons sensu stricto, that I am concerned in the following study. In other words, the primary purpose of this thesis is to bring under scrutiny Thomas’s poetics, by engaging with his artistic strategies of conveying experience. In undertaking this topic, I wish to go back to the forgotten roots, as well as broadening the horizons of enquiry on Thomas’s verse. Introducing his critical biography of Thomas, Justin Wintle identifies its origins as an “attempt to seize up a prodigious and controversial figure” (xiii) who “has often appeared to the public as an eccentric, even perverse” person, not least because “[a]nyone who is a poet and an Anglican priest and a Welsh nationalist must, to the casual contemporary English or anglicized Welsh onlooker at least, seem definably odd” (xiv). Tellingly, the book bears the title of Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S. Thomas and God. Pinpointing this poetry’s connection to religion and nationality as areas of curiosity for (potential or actual) readers, Wintle’s comment provides an indication of the key issues underpinning the reception of this poetry.2 So far, scholarly commentary has circled principally around his faith, or – sometimes drawing its nourishment from postcolonialism – has sought to clarify the relationship between his (predominantly English-language) writings and Wales. In spite of such uniformity of interest, reception of Thomas’s verse seems to be at its core marred by contention. “Thomas's greatness as a poet [mostly lies] in the establishment of a sustained body of lyric poetry of an austerely rigorous work, choosing, refining, rejecting. Le mot juste! How much of the poet’s time is taken up . in seeking the right, the best, the most characteristic word, noun or adjective. It is worth remembering, when we read a poem and take for granted the felicitous phrasing, the happy choice of word or rhyme, that the so-called inspiration which produced it, was often as much due to the many hours of hard work and thought, as it was to instinct” (73). 2 Cf. also Neil Corcoran’s conclusion that Thomas “had two preoccupying themes: rural Wales and his difficult relationship with the Christian God” (74). For discussions of Thomas’s religious positions specifically, see for instance Barry Morgan Strangely Orthodox, A.M. Allchin “Poetry,” William J. McGill Poets’ Meeting, or William V. Davis “Apocalyptic Mode.” Research focusing on nationality issues includes M. Wynn Thomas’s “For Wales,”
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