{"id":95,"date":"2016-07-03T16:07:08","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T16:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=95"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:46","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:46","slug":"s-j-perry-chameleon-poet-r-s-thomas-and-the-literary-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/s-j-perry-chameleon-poet-r-s-thomas-and-the-literary-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"S. J. Perry. Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

S. J. Perry. Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition<\/em><\/a>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 312p., ill. ISBN 9780199687336. \u00a355.00 (hardback).<\/p>\n

S. J. Perry\u2019s Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition <\/em><\/a>rests its arguments on two principle claims: first, that R. S. Thomas\u2019s life and work have too often been considered in light of his insistent Welsh nationalism when in fact his poetry, which grows out of a much more hesitant, shifting sense of self, is better understood as a series of chameleonic reactions to writers from England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States and elsewhere; second, that Thomas\u2019s most significant poetic debts\u2014and those that have been least explored\u2014are to the English poetic tradition, especially to an \u201cEnglish line\u201d of poetry that extends from William Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy, then through Edward Thomas to Philip Larkin. Perry borrows this idea from Samuel Hynes, who has argued for a \u201cgenetic\u201d line of inheritance in English poetry. Even Thomas\u2019s nationalism, Perry argues, owes at least as much to his reading of English poetry and English cultural criticism as it does to any Welsh source. Thus, Chameleon Poet <\/em>is, on one hand, a study in poetic response and, on the other, an argument for an \u201cEnglish\u201d R. S. Thomas.<\/p>\n

As a study of poetic response, Chameleon Poet <\/em>is very good. While many of the influences Perry examines\u2014including Patrick Kavanagh\u2019s The Great Hunger<\/em> and the poetry of W. B. Yeats, Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes\u2014have been discussed elsewhere, Perry mines them more deeply, and he considers poetic models that others have overlooked, including Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert. However, as he illuminates Thomas\u2019s multi-layered responses to these and other writers, Perry\u2019s efforts to give primacy to English influences seem misplaced. While he is right, for example, to begin with the impact of F. T. Palgrave\u2019s Golden Treasury <\/em>on the schoolboy R. S. Thomas, there is no reason to conclude that the English poets anthologized therein were any more central to his development than the Scottish and Irish writers he devoured soon after, among them Fiona Macleod, William Butler Yeats, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh and Hugh MacDiarmid. This is to say nothing of the many Welsh influences that, given his focus on \u201cthe literary tradition\u201d (an exclusive, politicized, Anglocentric term), Perry disregards.<\/p>\n

Perry is most convincing when he adopts what he calls an \u201carchipelagic\u201d model that refuses to define identity along national lines. He employs both Keats\u2019s notion of the \u201cchameleon poet\u201d and Yeats\u2019s theory of the mask to demonstrate how R. S. Thomas \u201cinhabited\u201d the lives of diverse writers, his poetry emerging from a quarrel with them as much as a quarrel with himself. Perry takes this discussion beyond the British archipelago to include American poets, including Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and the various voices Thomas encountered through his relationship with the journal Critical Quarterly. <\/em>And, in his discussion of Seamus Heaney\u2019s Death of a Naturalist<\/em>, Perry also shows how other poets benefited from their own quarrels with R. S. Thomas. These archipelagic and global assessments are almost always convincing, as are Perry\u2019s discussions of English writers \u2014 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example \u2014 when considered within this context. But Perry\u2019s determination to see R. S. Thomas as the inheritor of an \u201cEnglish line\u201d \u2014 most conspicuous, perhaps, in his unconvincing attempt to compare him to Philip Larkin \u2014 is at odds with the best parts of his book.<\/p>\n

Rhetoric surrounding a reified \u201cEnglish tradition\u201d has been used to marginalize or exclude too many Anglophone poets, including, ironically, R. S. Thomas, who puzzled and frustrated English critics when his philosophical proclivities and experimental prosodies led him beyond the small, Welsh, rural plot they afforded him. It could be argued that S. J. Perry releases Thomas from that narrow furrow by further excavating his significant debts to English authors, but as thorough and nuanced as his arguments are, Perry takes us a step backward by insisting on the very idea of tradition that has allowed some critics and reviewers to limit the breadth of Thomas\u2019s achievement. Rather than attempting to show how R. S. Thomas fits within \u201cthe literary tradition,\u201d a better end to this useful and thoughtful study would have been to fully embrace the \u201carchipelagic\u201d model that it offers and to show how the chameleon-like, mask-wearing R. S. Thomas, whose conflicted identity and polyphonic poetry shifted and evolved so much over time, challenges the very concept of such a tradition.<\/p>\n

Daniel Westover
\nEast Tennessee State University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

S. J. Perry. Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 312p., ill. ISBN 9780199687336. \u00a355.00 (hardback). S. J. Perry\u2019s Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition rests its arguments on two principle claims: first, that R. S. Thomas\u2019s life and work have too often been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1930],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-europe"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2496,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/2496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}