Poetry as autobiography

‘This To Do’ is a frequently overlooked poem in R. S. Thomas’s 1966 collection Pieta. Although appearing twenty years into Thomas’s career as a published poet, Pieta effectively ends the early periods of work at Manafon (1942–54) and Eglwysfach (1954–67) and simultaneously initiates the succeeding periods at Aberdaron (1967–78) and Rhiw (1978–94) on the Llyn peninsula in north Wales. The collection falls not only within a geographical transition for the poet but at a major thematic cross-roads as well. The move to Aberdaron in 1967 marks in Thomas’s work a gradual letting go of his long absorption and wrestling with the life of the upland farm communities and, if not his actual insistence, at least his poetic insistence on a personal and national Welsh identity.1 The poetry of Aberdaron and later Rhiw is conspicuously ‘ingrowing’. It depicts an altogether inward and downward metaphysical probing of the nature of deity and of the individual self. Of course in one sense Thomas has always been a poet of interiors, and yet it seems clear that the poems of the Aberdaron period contribute increasingly toward a sustained project in autobiography. My suggestion here is not that Thomas begins a project in poetic autobiography after moving to Aberdaron, but more that, for Thomas, poetry, by its very definition, is autobiography. The poems written after the move to Aberdaron illustrate a significant acceleration and intensification of that autobiographical instinct. In this first chapter my technique will be to explore the idea of poetry as autobiography using Thomas’s poem ‘This To Do’, but also introducing the work of a fairly wide range of other major writers who, while perhaps not directly influential on Thomas’s work, have nevertheless undertaken similar projects in their own writing and thus become a loose context in the light of which Thomas’s work in this area becomes more clear. I rely most heavily here upon Montaigne’s writings in his Essays and on much of the prose work of Seamus Heaney. I also suggest specific parallels in the theoretical work of Charles Olson and Wallace Stevens, and in the poetry of Derek Walcott. In addition to these parallels I want also chapter1 28/1/05 1:21 pm Page 13