R. S. Thomas

Tony Brown

‘ . . . a thoughtful and authoritative study . . . essential reading for all students and teachers of R. S. Thomas.’ Meic Stephens, Emeritus Professor of Welsh Writing in English, University of Glamorgan

‘This authoritative overview of R. S. Thomas’s career is as perceptive as it is comprehensive, economically interweaving life and work while never scanting the requirements to address the poetry down to the subtlest detail. It draws widely and discriminatingly on the insights into Thomas’s writing that are available in the extensive secondary sources and also uncovers some original primary materials. Moreover, relatively neglected periods in Thomas’s development are rewardingly examined in an attractively written study that is a model of clarity throughout, making it an indispensable introduction to a major twentieth century writer.’ M. Wynn Thomas, CREW, University of Wales Swansea

At his death in 2000, R. S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. An outspoken Welsh nationalist, he was also for many years a priest in the Church of Wales. At the same time his later poetry, considered by many as amongst the outstanding religious poetry of the twentieth century, is frequently a profound and anguished search for an elusive God in our contemporary world of globalized consumerism and technology.

Tony Brown’s study discusses the whole range of R. S. Thomas’s writing--his poetry of the life of the hill farmers of mid-Wales, his often vigorous and controversial political poetry and his late poetry of spiritual searching--and sees Thomas’s perspective as consistently that of the outsider, unsure of his own identity, and seeking a mode of life where he could feel at home and culturally secure. Tony Brown’s reading of Thomas’s life and work provides a valuable introduction to the poet’s life and work as well as providing a range of new perspectives and insights, many based on uncollected or unpublished material, for those already familiar with the poetry.

Tony Brown is Reader in English and co-Director of the R. S. Thomas Study Centre at the University of Wales, Bangor.