When Rupert Hart-Davis agreed to publish Song at the Year's Turning (1955), R. S. Thomas's collection of all his previous poems that he wished to preserve, it was decided that a well-known poetic figure should be asked to draw attention to the volume,...

[This entry was updated by Jeffery A. Triggs (Madison, N.J.) from the entry by W. J. Keith (University of Toronto) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 395-405.] When Rupert Hart-Davis agreed to publish Song at the...

Wales-born poet R.S. Thomas, who turned 80 on Mar 29, 1993, has captured much of the undaunted spirit of the laboring Welshman in his English language poetry. Thomas, a clergyman by trade, does not believe that circumstances will improve for the Welsh. THE...

IF, IN the world's eyes, Dylan Thomas is the most famous writer ever to have come out of Wales, his namesake R.S. Thomas is, in the view of many, the better poet. In Wales, where the bard is still held in high esteem, opinion...

The poetry of R. S. Thomas conveys the prime impression of a single force directed to one carefully limited theme, the isolation of the natural rhythm of man's life ("Rhythm of the long scythe") in the natural order, seen with irony, occasional bitterness, with urbane control of word and metric, and a tautness of mind, the fruit of a particular urbanity. Indeed, there is especial irony in attributing this urbane quality to a poet who so passionately repudiates the urban. For all the com...

The poems [in Frequencies] have become a cumulative succession of brief, intense engagements between need and silence; again and again they attempt an imaginative synthesis of "the interior / that calls", "the verbal hunger / for the thing in itself" and "untenanted space", "the darkness between stars". As for Eliot, whose "vacant interstellar spaces" R. S. Thomas's universe recalls, "each venture is a new beginning" ...

[Laboratories of The Spirit] has that rare combination of personal honesty and high artistic achievement which isn't so common: even the best "confessional" verse is, by its nature, often more than a little dishonest. And a poetry which consists so largely of statement refuses critical comment. Insofar as Thomas's book has a dominating theme it is formulated at once in the opening lines:

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St Kevin and the Blackbird, The Blackbird Singing and The Oven Bird share the common theme of birds, and more specifically the species of Blackbirds. Each poem is biographical to the particular writer in certain ways.