Thomas's Homage to Stevens

Sir:

It was gratifying to see R. S. Thomas's response to the poetry of Wallace Stevens receiving such thoughtful attention in Andrew Rudd's article in PNR 156. It is a connection which has been referred to over the years by a couple of commentators on Thomas's work but has not received the attention which it deserves. Andrew Rudd draws attention to the two poems which Thomas wrote directly about the American poet, `Wallace Stevens' (1963) and `Homage to Wallace Stevens' (1995) and, as Rudd suggests, the dates of the two poems alone indicate something of the durability of Thomas's engagement with Stevens' work.

One might also want to draw attention to the differences between the terms in which Stevens is portrayed in the two poems. Rudd rightly draws attention to the bleakness of the earlier poem and shrewdly points to the echo of Stevens both in Thomas's reference to the baby `Mumbling the dry crust / Of poetry' (`Wallace Stevens') and in his poem `I' (the latter not in fact an `earlier poem' but dating from Thomas's 1972 volume Young and Old). What is striking about the 1963 poem is the partiality of its portrayal: the bleak terms in which Thomas sketches Stevens' birth, `the cold shadow / His mind cast', the echo of Frost's `Desert Places' (`The deep spaces between stars'), the assertion that `There was no spring in his world'. As Andrew Rudd reminds us, Stevens wrote powerfully of autumn and winter, as images of human spiritual moods and indeed of the human condition (`For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is', `The Snow Man'). But what Thomas leaves out is not just the exotic, ludic quality of of Stevens' work, especially the early poetry, but the rich sensuality of other human moods and seasons (`...young broods / Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight / Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble', `Credences of Summer'); mutability is never lost sight of, but, as in Keats, the very processes could be celebrated. As I have recently suggested (in Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas, ed Damian Walford Davies, University of Wales Press), Thomas's construction of Stevens in this poem perhaps tells us more about R.S. Thomas himself at this point in his career than it does about the American poet. By 1962 Thomas had left the hill country of mid-Wales and had become vicar at Eglwysfach, near Aberystwyth. To judge from the poems published alongside `Wallace Stevens' in The Bread of Truth (1963), this was a period when Thomas was experiencing considerable emotional insecurity and a sense of spiritual isolation (`Keeping my own / Company now, I have forsaken / All but this bare basement of bone, / Where the one dry flame is awake', `This'; ` It is a dark night ... The real fight goes on / In the mind; protect me, / Spirits, from myself', `Welsh Border' ). It is Stevens' imaginative courage, struggling on in a dark world, `painfully on the poem's crutch', that Thomas responds to.

The later `Homage to Wallace Stevens' is not only more assured in every sense, the poet more at ease, but it registers more of Stevens' imaginative world, including his sensory richness, `his metaphors like incense'. There is some characteristic Thomas punning on `insured' and `balancing'; indeed this latter image underlines what it was in Stevens that continued to draw Thomas to his work. The image of the lonely believer struggling to keep his balance, his spiritual footing, in a world from which God seems to have absented himself is of course a recurrent one in Thomas's later poetry, though more usually the reference is less to Stevens than to Kierkegaard (`...there is a plank / to walk over seventy thousand fathoms', `Balance').

As well as the direct references to Stevens in the two poems mentioned and, for instance, Thomas's `Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man', other echoes are more elusive, and more subtle, as Andrew Rudd's reference to Thomas's `I' indicates. `Mrs Li', for instance, collected in The Bread of Truth, the same volume as `Wallace Stevens', is not only very different in mood from the bleak tones of much of that volume (it was in fact originally published seven years earlier), but it is a poem which scarcely fits critical preconceptions of Thomas as a poet of bleak hills and austerity of feeling:

Mrs Li, whose person I adore,
Said to me once, walking on the shore,
The wind's voices whispering at the ear's
Innocent portal: Love is like the sea's
Wandering blossom; we are the waves,
Who wear it wreathed a moment in our hair...

Given the female figure in a seaside setting, the Stevens-like title, and the sensuous tone of the poem as a whole, one might suggest that echoes of the American poet were again in Thomas's mind, especially perhaps `The Idea of Order at Key West' (where the `words of the sea' are `Words of the fragrant portals').

I would, though, wish to quibble with Andrew Rudd when he says that many of Thomas's `uncollected poems are remarkably diverse in their subject matter and style, but those he collects into his books have a much narrower range'. Certainly there are remarkable poems amongst the many that Thomas left uncollected over the years, and my Bangor colleague, Jason Walford Davies, and I are currently at work on rounding up these poems with a view to publication of a selection of them. (They are often to be found in some very obscure publications, and any assistance from your readers would be both welcomed and acknowledged.)

But I am almost at a loss to know where to begin to rebut the idea that R. S. Thomas's collected poems are narrow in range. Surely the fifty years' writing that moves from the poems of the Welsh hills, through the more political poems of the 1960s, to the often anguished spiritual searching of the later work (some of the finest religious poetry written in Britain in the twentieth century) exhibits not just a range of subject matter, or even of style, but, strikingly, of feeling: from the bleakness of the earlier work to the deeply moving tenderness of the late poems in memory of his first wife:

To all light things
I compared her; to
a snowflake, a feather.

I remember she rested
at the dance on my
arm, as a bird

on its nest lest
the eggs break, lest
she lean too heavily

on our love. Snow
melts, feathers
are blown away;
 I have let
her ashes down
in me like an anchor.
                   (` Comparisons', Residues, Bloodaxe 2002).

Reduced Hughes

Sir:

David Gervais, in his `Interim View' of Ted Hughes's Collected Poems (PNR 157), raises the essential questions - to do with that anomaly, an almost professional and fulltime poet in Britain and in his time, when before him T.S. Eliot could not be that, and W.B. Yeats seemed the last who had been. If, apart from his partnership as a farmer, Ted Hughes was to make a living as a poet - to be an Anthony Trollope, belatedly, in a minority medium - his output had to be prodigious, like Trollope's (who remained a civil servant for basic security), and not all of that output could possibly be part of his definitive canon. Being an honest poet, Ted was aware of that, and some emphasis ought to have been given to his own - fairly late selection from his published work, his New Selected Poems 1957-1994, as a step, taken by himself, towards the necessary sifting, which, of course, could not be more than a step while his work was still in full spate.

Ted Hughes attached so much importance to this book that he gave me two copies of it with inscriptions, one in October 1995, with the inscription

For Michael and Anne
    Something old
    Something new
    Something rosy
    Something blue
        Love
        Ted

the other in June 1997, with the more cryptic and significant words

For Anne and Michael
ceremonial corrected copy
     with love
          from
          Ted

although it is a copy of the same impression with no corrections in his hand.

Ted gave us copies of many earlier publications, but excluded his books of poems for children, with one exception, inscribed not to us but to our children. Of the limited editions among them - and limited editions, prolific also in Ted's output, were part of his economy - at least one, The Burning of the Brothel (1966), is not represented at all in his own retrospective selection; and his inscription in that is a poem of some length that could be added to his collected poems if addition, not subtraction, were the requirement in his case.

What set Ted Hughes apart in all matters was his generosity, his magnanimity, and this largesse extended to his publications. Had he lived longer and ceased to produce as copiously as he did, he might have had to apply himself to the reduction towards which the New Selected Poems was a first step.


Janácek and Kafka

Sir:

Marius Kociejowski says ( PNR 157), `I have not been able to discover any connection between [Janáček] and Kafka and sadly I must conclude that they were unaware of each other's existence.' Perhaps I am being obtuse, but surely Max Brod is the connection. In literary circles Brod, although himself a novelist, is known as the editor and biographer of Kafka. In musical circles Brod, although himself a composer, is known as one of the first critics to recognise Janáček's genius and as the German translator of several of Janáček's operas, which first became known outside Czechoslovakia in his versions. The friendships overlapped between 1916, when Brod and Janáček met, and 1924, when Kafka died.

It is possible, I suppose, that Brod never mentioned one to the other, but this seems unlikely. Two very likely occasions for a mention can be found quickly in Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. The first was in March 1918, when Bruno Kafka, a cousin of Franz who was a rightwing politician, protested to the authorities about a performance of Janáček's Jenufa in Prague on the grounds that it compromised the `German character' of the city: this despite the fact that the performance was given using Brod's translation of the libretto into German. The second was in March 1924, when Brod went to Berlin for the première there of Jenufa and met Kafka: when Brod returned to Prague he took the dying Kafka with him. Kafka died in Prague on 3 June.

Brod says in his biography that Kafka was not at all musical, so perhaps Kafka would have taken no notice of a mention of Janáček. However Janáček was certainly interested in literature, and would surely have been intrigued to hear Kafka.

I hope that some real scholar can provide more definite facts.


Talking to God

Sir:

In his piece ( PNR 157) on the poetry of Fanny Howe - whose work, at least on this showing, has some alarming affinities with the School of Thribb - Daniel Kane wonders: `After all, how many poets nowadays talk overtly to God and related saints without a trace of irony or schmaltz?' Quite a few, surely, including several who will be familiar to readers of this magazine. Among the recently deceased, how about R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson, for a start?