R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) was a Welsh poet and an Anglican clergyman whose ironic anti-pastorals, poems of filial resentment, bold charting of the new cosmos, and dialogues with Wallace Stevens and Søren Kierkegaard are among the subjects explored in this collection of critical essays. The first volume to appear since the poet’s death in 2000,Echoes to the Amenconsiders the achievement and legacy of a Welsh icon and one of the great poets of the twentieth century, offering a broad and detailed assessment of the full range of Thomas’s distinguished career, as well as engaging new readings of the painful cultural, spiritual, and emotional tensions of his work.
Damian Walford Daviesis senior lecturer in English at Aberystwyth University.
A Note on Texts
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Extraordinary Man of the Bald Welsh Hills: The Iago Prytherch Poems PATRICK CROTTY
2. R. S. Thomas’s Welsh Pastoral GEOFFREY HILL
3. Was R. S. Thomas an Atheist Manqué? JOHN BARNIE
4. ‘The Curious Stars’: R. S. Thomas and the Scientific Revolution JOHN PIKOULIS
5. ‘Blessings, Stevens’: R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens TONY BROWN
6. Mirror Games: Self and M(O)ther in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas KATIE GRAMICH
7. ‘Double-entry Poetics’: R. S. Thomas – Punster DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES
8. ‘Time’s Changeling’: Autobiography in The Echoes Return Slow M. WYNN THOMAS
9. Suspending the Ethical: R. S. Thomas and Kierkegaard ROWAN WILLIAMS
Bibliography
Index
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