Thanks for reading and for your thoughtful comment. It’s not my intention to dismiss Thomas - he’s important to me, and I use words in this essay like moving, successful, extraordinary, and wonderful to describe some of his poems. It’s true I see bad sides to a lot of his work, but I know not everyone agrees, of course. My best wishes to you too.
this forces me to reflect on the irony of thomas' being such an important poet for me - because I, like you, find a lot of his freest free verse clumsy, if not lazy. you put it perfectly when you say that 'Thomas’s undeniable talent makes it all the worse. It reeks (to use another vivid Germanism) of misused power.' yes, his bad habits are all the more annoying because we know his good habits are great. but at the same time, there is another irony at work in that this most conservative and reactionary of men threw himself into the most brutal free verse and never looked back - like some sort of cultural marxist! we will probably never understand him tbh
Thanks for reading, as ever! Clearly, he's an important poet to me, too, and a lot of this essay is trying to wrestle with my own mixed feelings towards him. He should still be read, but his bad habits bother me a lot, and (as I said at much too great a length) the misanthropy particularly. I agree about these ironies too and that we'll never fully understand him. A fact I didn't include: in spite of his Welsh nationalism, he (like Orwell) put his son down for a place in an English boarding school. He contained multitudes, like all of us...
Yes this is a mystery isn't it -- I mean that he seems so conservative but embraced free verse so almost rigidly -- and I suppose in itself suggests that he wasn't as unregarding of the "literary world" as he pretended. There are quite a lot of points in common with C. S. Sisson and I suspect as with Sisson there is some deep class anxiety mixed in -- I don't think Thomas was really from a patrician background at all.
There's so much for my mind to go on engaging with here; thank you. Yes, what you say about the facility of misanthropy.
-- I'm not entirely convinced that Thomas would recognise his own feeling for or attempt at representing the "peasants" though? Ie, right after "... he was stone blind / To the print's magic" comes "yet his grass-green eye / Missed nor swoop nor swerve of the hawk's wing / Past the high window, and the breeze could bring / Above the babble of the room's uproar, / Songs to his ear from the sun-dusted moor, / The grey curlew's whistle and the shrill, far cry / Of circling buzzard ...." I did read his poetry in the dark, after midnight, mostly -- but I felt he saw someone like Twm connected to a landscape that despite all its "gaunt", "shrill" aspects, he innately (compulsively?) revered and wished to preserve/record. Ultimately there was something *not* emaciated here, to try to lay bare in all its ugliness.
Re: "gaunt womb" -- my instinctive reading there had to do with the source of life, of fertility/fecundity, of *abundance* -- as dwindled and meagre -- parsimonious. (I have lived with people who were not well nourished through a pregnancy, and this does produce a jarring visual effect; but I took it more emblematically?)
--edit: just thinking further about this, there is a lot of precedent in English literature for characterisations of the womb as a place that belies nurture. And that poem about Twm which opens -- "Twm was a dunce at school" ends with Twm "entombed in the lucid weather". He sees something elemental and even, pure. I think it's more complicated than mere misanthropy or misogyny.
Thank you for reading and for these very thoughtful (and challenging) comments.
I certainly think that you're right that his story is not only one of misanthropy, and you're right to upbraid me for not putting 'stone blind &c' in its full context. For me, the tone that sees these peasants as miserable and illiterate but having access to deeper truths about the soil veers too close to the archetypal (at least for my taste), which is why I see Thomas as not seeing these people as truly individual or (perhaps) even human. There is also too often the sense (though again, I think you're right to say, not necessarily in that poem) that he makes them props in own psycho-drama. (Obviously, I have conflicted feelings about this, and about him, which prompted the essay.)
I also think you're right the use of the word 'womb' is defensible, and has a long precedent. My conclusions about its use here partly spring from its description as 'gaunt' and partly from the overriding grimnness of the poem - the sense that this is a scene of pure misery. I see it as unexamined disgust, which is why I react in the way that I do. But of course it's a big world, Thomas is a very considerable poet, and I know my reactions are just my own.
Anyway, thank you for engaging so thoughtfully and fascinatingly!
Your essays are -- well-- dazzlingly articulate while staying honest, and they go on enriching my thoughts. Disagreement is natural. Something worth disagreeing with is much rarer. I'm sincerely sorry -- I didn't mean to seem to berate you. Just discuss literature I love from a different perspective ..
Yes I think you are fundamentally right that he saw a lot of these people as props in his own psychodrama. I guess I just think that psychodrama is more complex than malice (which so many "ogyny"s boil down to) and wasn't necessarily being dishonest about all the baldly subsisting misery. Still it held him and he found something in it he kept needing to sift and say, grappling with not just a demon but -- as with this particular TWM poem -- something/someone sublime.
Thank you with all my heart for your kind comments - it means so much. I didn’t think you were berating me - I very much value your thoughtful disagreement (especially as regards an author I wrestle with so much)!
He died at 87--and I'm guessing he really enjoyed a good meal. The worst kinds of frauds are those that make a long career out of despair, as this upright prick did. You call him a misanthrope? To me, he seems merely ambitious: Why does he bother so much if he feels the way he does? If he would just smile a crack . . . and stop trying to impress/depress us. But he cant. A reminder that Casaubons shouldn't attempt poetry.
Thank you for reading and for your comment! Thomas is one of those authors I wrestle with, and there is certainly a part of me that would like to call him a prick, since his defects bother me so much. Aspects of his life, and his perspective on the world, are a bit of a sad story, really.
Sad? For years, he milked his “despair” for all those pretty poems. Made his suffering his shtick. Reminds me of the Ella Fitzgerald song: Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try.
It's a weird and discomforting critical-thinking pleasure to read a clinical-but-not-hatchet-job reassessment, with blunt but granular interpretations, of a poet I've not read. And now won't. But bits of your essay will live on in post-it notes.
Thank you for reading, as ever, and for your comments! I'm glad you don't see this as a hatchet job, because it really isn't - I see good things and bad things in Thomas, and he is still worth reading, but with caution, as I say.
One of the strangest/funniest things R. S. Thomas ever did was write an introduction to Edward Thomas's Selected Poems (actually it was a strange decision by Faber to commission it, but anyway) in which he says very little of interest about the poetry and spends a great deal of space trying to argue that the most important thing about Thomas (Ed) was his Welshness.
Also: thanks for this, great stuff all round but especially on the verse form. It's so peculiar. Doesn't use the freedom 'free' verse might in theory offer. Almost like he doesn't like poetry, either.
Yes great point, perhaps what he liked about free verse (of a certain type) was perhaps the unpoetic-ness of it, the austerity of it. I certainly feel that so often in Thomas you can hear him making it "deliberately" unmusical.
Thank you very much for reading and for your kind and thoughtful comments!
I haven't read his introduction to Edward Thomas, and I'm certainly very curious to do so now. His Welshness too perhaps become a kind of shield: he was nationalistic at times both in the normal sense and in Orwell's sense. It also speaks (in my opinion anyway) of a tendency not to see other human beings as full human beings, but as archetypes or caricatures.
It's also very interesting what you say about his seeming almost not to like poetry, particularly given that some people say that about Larkin too. Yet in some ways I think Thomas is full of the sort of preciosity that Larkin sometimes seems to despise - again these very characteristic phrases like 'the heart's relics' and whatnot seem very... Poetic.
The Larkin review is fascinating as is the comparison. As is the un-poetry problem (for want of a better word). To an extent it is always what poets who are doing something new get accused of. T. S. Eliot was dismissed as prosaic. So, that's worth thinking about. I never felt Larkin was prosaic, in the negative sense, when I first read him. Or Eliot.
I hope that aren't too many people out there who imagine that Larkin is prosaic (but I know there are some). By not liking poetry I was thinking more of something like Sad Steps, the rebellion against the 'Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!' sort of writing.
Oh there are. But yes that pose is essential… but then Larkin’s reacting against something he can do and usually does do in the same poem (e.g. Church Going, which becomes in the end one of those large-scale hectoring verses he sneers at earlier… blent air…). Even the lozenge is… brilliant and earnest in a way.
This is a fascinating and provocative piece. I do think you are unfair on Thomas though in a most stimulating way, thank you. The frustrations engendered by the way he uses free verse are very well observed though I am not as convinced as you are that this is always or usually a matter of sloppiness or over-facility. There's lots to address here and your piece deserves a proper response. But for now I'll just say that I actually like the 'gaunt womb', and I think it's a bit silly to try to take it literally because *no-one* sees a womb: barring a particularly dreadful prolapse or surgical experience this is a crucial body part which is also always in some sense imaginary. The womb here, surely, stands as it so often does for a nourishing (or here, unnourishing) environment generally; for the hardness of the land; and elicits rather effectively I think very basic anxieties. He doesn't "really" mean the vagina because -- if we're going to be literal -- it is not the vagina that does the nourishing and nor is it the vagina that does the expelling (again, that's the womb). And the phrase sounds great.
Thank you for reading and for these kind and thoughtful comments.
Perhaps I am unfair on him, but I'm glad that you and my other readers see that this isn't and isn't supposed to be an attack-piece. I hope it's a critical essay, but it's also a personal essay, since Thomas is one of the great poets of loneliness and not (in my opinion) necessarily a very good friend to have a time of loneliness.
I think you and Isabel Chenot are in agreement about the phrase 'gaunt womb'. I do personally find it a badly written phrase (though I can't deny I've remembered it since I first read it) and I do feel a sense of misused power, that, as it were, something else is going on...
Then again, maybe I'm being ungenerous - would I see what I see if it was the only one of his poems I had read? Perhaps not.
You could well be right (he uses the word so much in his poetry that I'm sure he must mean that sometimes). Then again, even if in that case it would still strike me as a strange and harsh word to use in the context of a woman giving birth (especially given the old-style implications of desolation and barrenness...)
Thanks for this! I have never read Thomas and now I don't need to. I am convinced by your comments and selected examples. He seems worth reading but, given constraints, not a good use of my time. Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hall?
Thank you for reading! Thomas is worth reading, but there are certainly off-putting things, alas. I'm not familiar with Donald Hall, no - any recommendations to start with?
The late collection Throwing Away - or maybe just its last two poems: Villanelle (erotic "Katie could put her feet behind her head" and Affirmation, an elegy: " it is fitting and delicious to lose everything".
After "gaunt womb," "puckered window" is perversely fit for purpose. An entry/exit chiasmus of sorts.
Unlike "gaunt womb, "puckered window" conjures actual depression. No exit. Muscular and irrational closure. And yet--quite rightly it seems to me (new to this poet)-- depression is not his subject or yours, so the word, the condition, does not appear in the essay or the comments.
As another commenter says, there's much to think about here. I might even read the poetry.
Thank you for reading! - I'm glad this piece interested you. I would certainly recommend you read Thomas, notwithstanding the criticisms I made. I think you're right that depression is not his subject, although in many respects his poetry is shot through with it - and, for a reader experiencing depression, his poetry can hit very hard, for better or for worse.
I have been making my way through the entire R.S. Thomas collection as it looks like you have as well, Alexander. I read this essay when you first released and have been sitting on a reply for some time. It was great to see so much discussion on this poet in the comments, too!
I wonder if there might be a different interpretation of Thomas' general outlook on life which you characterize as largely misanthropic, viewing the people and life around him as objects of hate. Drawing this both from poetic lines and the facts of his life. The example I think of as relevant in this case is my own life - though it is not half as long as Thomas', there are some broad similarities. Work amongst a field of people to which we only vaguely belong; a penchant for pessimism or depression; an artistic bent that seems to want to always declare itself as 'different than yours'. In short, I think Thomas wasn't very much pleased with himself, primarily. Second to that were what he saw as the realities of life amongst the poor; what it really was, at least in part.
I work in and amongst the poor, and have for the better part of a decade, and also come from a poor background (although I won't overstate that I was never in the same SES as those I work with now). There's an interesting feeling floating somewhere on the surface of bitterness, disgust, regret, that is applied both those I am working with and to myself in attended moments. It's hard to describe but I think it's to do with whatever luck or providence or social connection that got me out of having to live the life of those I see before me every day being given to me even though I do not deserve it. As such, an opposite feeling also comes, of grudging respect ("what's living but courage?" - Lore, R.S. Thomas), before seeing something else that disgusts us and the cycle begins again. This sort of self-contempt leaks out into conversation and rumination if one is not careful. Personally I have come out of this sort of mindset in my own life, but I don't think that Thomas ever did; perhaps he could have and that is worth critiquing, if we think he willingly was miserable. It seems that choice might not have been available for his life, with the tools available in his context.
That's where I come to the idea that I think I hold him to not quite as high a standard because I pity him. He comes across to me as depressed, often projecting his feelings about himself onto those around him, but often enough he says it about himself as well I would say. His theology reflects this, with a cold God he can't easily feel, but who builds beautiful things that he and those around him barely notice and therefore don't deserve. Indeed perhaps that wholeness of self-image he couldn't give himself or take the offered gift from Christ was the treasure he mentions passing in 'The Bright Field'.
This may be a very personal rose-coloured take on our friend, and as such not have broad merit, but do let me know what you think, Alexander, I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
**Also, if anyone who became disinterested in reading Thomas because of Mr. Fayne's post I don't think that was his intention, so to offer some reading, here are some of my favourites if anyone feels bold enough to to brave the harsh cold of R.S. Thomas.
This is a fascinating comment and I’m very grateful for this level of engagement - particularly from someone who is clearly an attentive reader of Thomas (you’re right that it wasn’t my intention to encourage people not to read him).
The parallels you draw with your own life are especially interesting - and in particular the notion (if I understand you correctly) that Thomas may have suffered from a kind of noblesse oblige and a guilt at his own good fortune. Whether that’s true I don’t know, but the cycle you describe seems like a very plausible description of the cycle that he found himself in. If I judge him harshly for not having broken out of it (or for that matter for giving respect only grudgingly, for being preoccupied with an image of a Christian universe that I find incoherent), it’s perhaps because I find him a considerable imaginative writer, and therefore think he could have broken out of it, had he only wanted to.
well, your work is very thought-provoking and well-done! It certainly is hard to parse out truth from the depths of his (or anyone's) feelings at the end of the day. I also duly note the many contradictions in his life that you and a couple other commenters mentioned, but they lead me more to the conclusion that he was troubled than that he was a charlatan. Although perhaps these were mixed.
In terms of his imaginative writing not being able to break out of a unhelpful, hypocritical, or even immoral cycles or personality, I think there are lots of examples of poets and authors who couldn't!
Thanks for reading and for your thoughtful comment. It’s not my intention to dismiss Thomas - he’s important to me, and I use words in this essay like moving, successful, extraordinary, and wonderful to describe some of his poems. It’s true I see bad sides to a lot of his work, but I know not everyone agrees, of course. My best wishes to you too.
this forces me to reflect on the irony of thomas' being such an important poet for me - because I, like you, find a lot of his freest free verse clumsy, if not lazy. you put it perfectly when you say that 'Thomas’s undeniable talent makes it all the worse. It reeks (to use another vivid Germanism) of misused power.' yes, his bad habits are all the more annoying because we know his good habits are great. but at the same time, there is another irony at work in that this most conservative and reactionary of men threw himself into the most brutal free verse and never looked back - like some sort of cultural marxist! we will probably never understand him tbh
Thanks for reading, as ever! Clearly, he's an important poet to me, too, and a lot of this essay is trying to wrestle with my own mixed feelings towards him. He should still be read, but his bad habits bother me a lot, and (as I said at much too great a length) the misanthropy particularly. I agree about these ironies too and that we'll never fully understand him. A fact I didn't include: in spite of his Welsh nationalism, he (like Orwell) put his son down for a place in an English boarding school. He contained multitudes, like all of us...
Yes this is a mystery isn't it -- I mean that he seems so conservative but embraced free verse so almost rigidly -- and I suppose in itself suggests that he wasn't as unregarding of the "literary world" as he pretended. There are quite a lot of points in common with C. S. Sisson and I suspect as with Sisson there is some deep class anxiety mixed in -- I don't think Thomas was really from a patrician background at all.
yes, it seems that when it came to the modern style, he saw the writing on the wall (if I may use an aptly religious phrase)
There's so much for my mind to go on engaging with here; thank you. Yes, what you say about the facility of misanthropy.
-- I'm not entirely convinced that Thomas would recognise his own feeling for or attempt at representing the "peasants" though? Ie, right after "... he was stone blind / To the print's magic" comes "yet his grass-green eye / Missed nor swoop nor swerve of the hawk's wing / Past the high window, and the breeze could bring / Above the babble of the room's uproar, / Songs to his ear from the sun-dusted moor, / The grey curlew's whistle and the shrill, far cry / Of circling buzzard ...." I did read his poetry in the dark, after midnight, mostly -- but I felt he saw someone like Twm connected to a landscape that despite all its "gaunt", "shrill" aspects, he innately (compulsively?) revered and wished to preserve/record. Ultimately there was something *not* emaciated here, to try to lay bare in all its ugliness.
Re: "gaunt womb" -- my instinctive reading there had to do with the source of life, of fertility/fecundity, of *abundance* -- as dwindled and meagre -- parsimonious. (I have lived with people who were not well nourished through a pregnancy, and this does produce a jarring visual effect; but I took it more emblematically?)
--edit: just thinking further about this, there is a lot of precedent in English literature for characterisations of the womb as a place that belies nurture. And that poem about Twm which opens -- "Twm was a dunce at school" ends with Twm "entombed in the lucid weather". He sees something elemental and even, pure. I think it's more complicated than mere misanthropy or misogyny.
Thank you for reading and for these very thoughtful (and challenging) comments.
I certainly think that you're right that his story is not only one of misanthropy, and you're right to upbraid me for not putting 'stone blind &c' in its full context. For me, the tone that sees these peasants as miserable and illiterate but having access to deeper truths about the soil veers too close to the archetypal (at least for my taste), which is why I see Thomas as not seeing these people as truly individual or (perhaps) even human. There is also too often the sense (though again, I think you're right to say, not necessarily in that poem) that he makes them props in own psycho-drama. (Obviously, I have conflicted feelings about this, and about him, which prompted the essay.)
I also think you're right the use of the word 'womb' is defensible, and has a long precedent. My conclusions about its use here partly spring from its description as 'gaunt' and partly from the overriding grimnness of the poem - the sense that this is a scene of pure misery. I see it as unexamined disgust, which is why I react in the way that I do. But of course it's a big world, Thomas is a very considerable poet, and I know my reactions are just my own.
Anyway, thank you for engaging so thoughtfully and fascinatingly!
Your essays are -- well-- dazzlingly articulate while staying honest, and they go on enriching my thoughts. Disagreement is natural. Something worth disagreeing with is much rarer. I'm sincerely sorry -- I didn't mean to seem to berate you. Just discuss literature I love from a different perspective ..
Yes I think you are fundamentally right that he saw a lot of these people as props in his own psychodrama. I guess I just think that psychodrama is more complex than malice (which so many "ogyny"s boil down to) and wasn't necessarily being dishonest about all the baldly subsisting misery. Still it held him and he found something in it he kept needing to sift and say, grappling with not just a demon but -- as with this particular TWM poem -- something/someone sublime.
Thank you again.
Thank you with all my heart for your kind comments - it means so much. I didn’t think you were berating me - I very much value your thoughtful disagreement (especially as regards an author I wrestle with so much)!
He died at 87--and I'm guessing he really enjoyed a good meal. The worst kinds of frauds are those that make a long career out of despair, as this upright prick did. You call him a misanthrope? To me, he seems merely ambitious: Why does he bother so much if he feels the way he does? If he would just smile a crack . . . and stop trying to impress/depress us. But he cant. A reminder that Casaubons shouldn't attempt poetry.
Thank you for reading and for your comment! Thomas is one of those authors I wrestle with, and there is certainly a part of me that would like to call him a prick, since his defects bother me so much. Aspects of his life, and his perspective on the world, are a bit of a sad story, really.
Sad? For years, he milked his “despair” for all those pretty poems. Made his suffering his shtick. Reminds me of the Ella Fitzgerald song: Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try.
Yes, I think he was trapped, and got trapped by others into a reputation, and trapped himself, all at the same time.
It's a weird and discomforting critical-thinking pleasure to read a clinical-but-not-hatchet-job reassessment, with blunt but granular interpretations, of a poet I've not read. And now won't. But bits of your essay will live on in post-it notes.
Thank you for reading, as ever, and for your comments! I'm glad you don't see this as a hatchet job, because it really isn't - I see good things and bad things in Thomas, and he is still worth reading, but with caution, as I say.
One of the strangest/funniest things R. S. Thomas ever did was write an introduction to Edward Thomas's Selected Poems (actually it was a strange decision by Faber to commission it, but anyway) in which he says very little of interest about the poetry and spends a great deal of space trying to argue that the most important thing about Thomas (Ed) was his Welshness.
Also: thanks for this, great stuff all round but especially on the verse form. It's so peculiar. Doesn't use the freedom 'free' verse might in theory offer. Almost like he doesn't like poetry, either.
Yes great point, perhaps what he liked about free verse (of a certain type) was perhaps the unpoetic-ness of it, the austerity of it. I certainly feel that so often in Thomas you can hear him making it "deliberately" unmusical.
Thank you very much for reading and for your kind and thoughtful comments!
I haven't read his introduction to Edward Thomas, and I'm certainly very curious to do so now. His Welshness too perhaps become a kind of shield: he was nationalistic at times both in the normal sense and in Orwell's sense. It also speaks (in my opinion anyway) of a tendency not to see other human beings as full human beings, but as archetypes or caricatures.
It's also very interesting what you say about his seeming almost not to like poetry, particularly given that some people say that about Larkin too. Yet in some ways I think Thomas is full of the sort of preciosity that Larkin sometimes seems to despise - again these very characteristic phrases like 'the heart's relics' and whatnot seem very... Poetic.
The Larkin review is fascinating as is the comparison. As is the un-poetry problem (for want of a better word). To an extent it is always what poets who are doing something new get accused of. T. S. Eliot was dismissed as prosaic. So, that's worth thinking about. I never felt Larkin was prosaic, in the negative sense, when I first read him. Or Eliot.
I hope that aren't too many people out there who imagine that Larkin is prosaic (but I know there are some). By not liking poetry I was thinking more of something like Sad Steps, the rebellion against the 'Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!' sort of writing.
Oh there are. But yes that pose is essential… but then Larkin’s reacting against something he can do and usually does do in the same poem (e.g. Church Going, which becomes in the end one of those large-scale hectoring verses he sneers at earlier… blent air…). Even the lozenge is… brilliant and earnest in a way.
You’re right - consistency is for cooking, as they say…
This is a fascinating and provocative piece. I do think you are unfair on Thomas though in a most stimulating way, thank you. The frustrations engendered by the way he uses free verse are very well observed though I am not as convinced as you are that this is always or usually a matter of sloppiness or over-facility. There's lots to address here and your piece deserves a proper response. But for now I'll just say that I actually like the 'gaunt womb', and I think it's a bit silly to try to take it literally because *no-one* sees a womb: barring a particularly dreadful prolapse or surgical experience this is a crucial body part which is also always in some sense imaginary. The womb here, surely, stands as it so often does for a nourishing (or here, unnourishing) environment generally; for the hardness of the land; and elicits rather effectively I think very basic anxieties. He doesn't "really" mean the vagina because -- if we're going to be literal -- it is not the vagina that does the nourishing and nor is it the vagina that does the expelling (again, that's the womb). And the phrase sounds great.
Thank you for reading and for these kind and thoughtful comments.
Perhaps I am unfair on him, but I'm glad that you and my other readers see that this isn't and isn't supposed to be an attack-piece. I hope it's a critical essay, but it's also a personal essay, since Thomas is one of the great poets of loneliness and not (in my opinion) necessarily a very good friend to have a time of loneliness.
I think you and Isabel Chenot are in agreement about the phrase 'gaunt womb'. I do personally find it a badly written phrase (though I can't deny I've remembered it since I first read it) and I do feel a sense of misused power, that, as it were, something else is going on...
Then again, maybe I'm being ungenerous - would I see what I see if it was the only one of his poems I had read? Perhaps not.
Very good thought I suspect when writing “gaunt womb” he meant “gaunt” as in desolate — the word can be used to describe places, not just persons
Thank you for reading!
You could well be right (he uses the word so much in his poetry that I'm sure he must mean that sometimes). Then again, even if in that case it would still strike me as a strange and harsh word to use in the context of a woman giving birth (especially given the old-style implications of desolation and barrenness...)
Yeah— definitely jarring. My favourite christo-pessimist!
Great essay, Alexander! Please check this out.
https://substack.com/@moleary/note/c-183639238
Thank you for reading! I've just replied to your note.
Thanks for this! I have never read Thomas and now I don't need to. I am convinced by your comments and selected examples. He seems worth reading but, given constraints, not a good use of my time. Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hall?
Thank you for reading! Thomas is worth reading, but there are certainly off-putting things, alas. I'm not familiar with Donald Hall, no - any recommendations to start with?
The late collection Throwing Away - or maybe just its last two poems: Villanelle (erotic "Katie could put her feet behind her head" and Affirmation, an elegy: " it is fitting and delicious to lose everything".
After "gaunt womb," "puckered window" is perversely fit for purpose. An entry/exit chiasmus of sorts.
Unlike "gaunt womb, "puckered window" conjures actual depression. No exit. Muscular and irrational closure. And yet--quite rightly it seems to me (new to this poet)-- depression is not his subject or yours, so the word, the condition, does not appear in the essay or the comments.
As another commenter says, there's much to think about here. I might even read the poetry.
Thanks.
Thank you for reading! - I'm glad this piece interested you. I would certainly recommend you read Thomas, notwithstanding the criticisms I made. I think you're right that depression is not his subject, although in many respects his poetry is shot through with it - and, for a reader experiencing depression, his poetry can hit very hard, for better or for worse.
I have been making my way through the entire R.S. Thomas collection as it looks like you have as well, Alexander. I read this essay when you first released and have been sitting on a reply for some time. It was great to see so much discussion on this poet in the comments, too!
I wonder if there might be a different interpretation of Thomas' general outlook on life which you characterize as largely misanthropic, viewing the people and life around him as objects of hate. Drawing this both from poetic lines and the facts of his life. The example I think of as relevant in this case is my own life - though it is not half as long as Thomas', there are some broad similarities. Work amongst a field of people to which we only vaguely belong; a penchant for pessimism or depression; an artistic bent that seems to want to always declare itself as 'different than yours'. In short, I think Thomas wasn't very much pleased with himself, primarily. Second to that were what he saw as the realities of life amongst the poor; what it really was, at least in part.
I work in and amongst the poor, and have for the better part of a decade, and also come from a poor background (although I won't overstate that I was never in the same SES as those I work with now). There's an interesting feeling floating somewhere on the surface of bitterness, disgust, regret, that is applied both those I am working with and to myself in attended moments. It's hard to describe but I think it's to do with whatever luck or providence or social connection that got me out of having to live the life of those I see before me every day being given to me even though I do not deserve it. As such, an opposite feeling also comes, of grudging respect ("what's living but courage?" - Lore, R.S. Thomas), before seeing something else that disgusts us and the cycle begins again. This sort of self-contempt leaks out into conversation and rumination if one is not careful. Personally I have come out of this sort of mindset in my own life, but I don't think that Thomas ever did; perhaps he could have and that is worth critiquing, if we think he willingly was miserable. It seems that choice might not have been available for his life, with the tools available in his context.
That's where I come to the idea that I think I hold him to not quite as high a standard because I pity him. He comes across to me as depressed, often projecting his feelings about himself onto those around him, but often enough he says it about himself as well I would say. His theology reflects this, with a cold God he can't easily feel, but who builds beautiful things that he and those around him barely notice and therefore don't deserve. Indeed perhaps that wholeness of self-image he couldn't give himself or take the offered gift from Christ was the treasure he mentions passing in 'The Bright Field'.
This may be a very personal rose-coloured take on our friend, and as such not have broad merit, but do let me know what you think, Alexander, I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
**Also, if anyone who became disinterested in reading Thomas because of Mr. Fayne's post I don't think that was his intention, so to offer some reading, here are some of my favourites if anyone feels bold enough to to brave the harsh cold of R.S. Thomas.
The White Tiger - https://www.poeticous.com/r-s-thomas/the-white-tiger
The Bright Field - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk7l9MmaTsQ
To A Young Poet - https://allpoetry.com/poem/8519865-To-a-Young-Poet-by-R-S-Thomas
The Unborn Daughter, Sailor Poet, The Musician, Lore, The Maker. (If anyone would like to read these, message me I'll send you a picture of the page).
This is a fascinating comment and I’m very grateful for this level of engagement - particularly from someone who is clearly an attentive reader of Thomas (you’re right that it wasn’t my intention to encourage people not to read him).
The parallels you draw with your own life are especially interesting - and in particular the notion (if I understand you correctly) that Thomas may have suffered from a kind of noblesse oblige and a guilt at his own good fortune. Whether that’s true I don’t know, but the cycle you describe seems like a very plausible description of the cycle that he found himself in. If I judge him harshly for not having broken out of it (or for that matter for giving respect only grudgingly, for being preoccupied with an image of a Christian universe that I find incoherent), it’s perhaps because I find him a considerable imaginative writer, and therefore think he could have broken out of it, had he only wanted to.
well, your work is very thought-provoking and well-done! It certainly is hard to parse out truth from the depths of his (or anyone's) feelings at the end of the day. I also duly note the many contradictions in his life that you and a couple other commenters mentioned, but they lead me more to the conclusion that he was troubled than that he was a charlatan. Although perhaps these were mixed.
In terms of his imaginative writing not being able to break out of a unhelpful, hypocritical, or even immoral cycles or personality, I think there are lots of examples of poets and authors who couldn't!
I completely agree! It'd probably be more difficult to find a great poet who wasn't trapped in a cycle like that...