Gale Researcher Guide for: Britain's Languages and Regional Literatures: The Case of R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas was one of the major British poets of the twentieth century. He is particularly celebrated in his native Wales, and his poetry is recognized as vital for defining and contesting Welsh nationhood, history, landscape, and identity. While he learned Welsh as an adult and employed it in his prose, his poetry–which appeared in a substantial number of collections from 1946 onward¬–is entirely in English. It is his earliest work that is most explicitly concerned with the regional and national identities of Wales, depicting rural landscapes and people Thomas encountered in his professional work as a priest. Thomas is both at home and alienated in these poems¬; both part of a Welsh community and set apart from those he observes. Analyzing poems from Thomas’s early period illuminates how he dealt with key concerns such as rural labor, the act of writing, the threat of modernization, the connections between the human and nonhuman, and the role of language in mediating the world