R. S. Thomas Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Mole

Critical Essay by John Mole

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" and a central theme of Frequencies is the inadequacy and failure of vocabularies….

Frequencies is a profound collection with a beautiful gravity of utterance capable of absorbing its intermittent lapses into portentousness and abstraction. R. S. Thomas's strength has always been in his deployment of metaphor, and when he relies on plain statements of position he can teeter on the brink of the absurd…. As always there is a suspicion that some of the characteristic neat encapsulations come a trifle too easily ("time's face", "the...
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