Abstract
One aspect of R.S. Thomas’s work which is perhaps most difficult for Americans to fathom is his relation to Welsh nationalism. This rather arcane issue is complicated even further by the fact that Thomas is an Anglo-Welsh poet, indeed the guiding spirit of what is known as the Anglo-Welsh movement. Tony Bianchi has called Thomas “the dominant voice in the attempt by Anglo-Welsh writers to define an audience.” Throughout his career, Thomas has been faced with the difficult choice of writing poetry in what he considers a foreign language, or committing creative suicide. Having been born in “the capital of a fake nation” (The Echoes Return Slow 4), that is, Cardiff in English speaking southern Wales, Thomas did not learn Welsh until he was thirty, too late for it to be of use for poetry (Selected Prose 182). The resultant tensions in his work are sometimes overlooked by English critics, who would rather welcome Thomas as a distinguished “colonial” contributor to their own literature, and who thus concentrate for the most part on his celebrated movement in later years toward more inward, spiritual, and therefore more international themes. And yet even Thomas’s later religious poetry should be understood in the context of his distinctly national concerns, as indeed many of the pieces in his Selected Prose, as well as passages in his most recent work, The Echoes Return Slow, make clear.