Vernon Watkins and R.S. Thomas

Dennis BROWN

pp. 221-236

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Vernon Watkins (1906–1967) and R. S. Thomas (1915-) have both expressed preoccupations of Anglo-Welsh verse in the latter half of this century. Special numbers of Poetry Wales,¹ in particular, have considered their work in this light, and the nature of their contributions to a sense of Welsh cultural identity remains of critical interest. Nevertheless, both poets have written specifically in English and out of a largely English tradition — in each case with particular debts to mainstream Metaphysical and Romantic poetry. And while each poet, in ways, seems somewhat at the margins of recent poetic trends, each appears, at times, to be influenced by well-known contemporary writers — Watkins by his friend Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas by the later Ted Hughes. Both are essentially religious poets working within a predominantly secular culture: Watkins's stance is that of neo-Platonic rapture; Thomas's is that of via negativa scepticism. Both are particularly concerned with the relation between time and eternity. At the same time, both Watkins and Thomas conform to the twentieth-century norm of expressing themselves through collections of short poems rather than aspiring to quasi-epic structure: Watkins's lyrics are typically conventional in form; Thomas's mature poems, though scarcely experimental in the modernist sense, are somewhat free and formless verse-mediations.