From
"The Site Inviolate - R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)"
by Walford Davies, Planet 144:

Though R.S. Thomas always lamented England's ignorance of the otherness of Wales, he applauded T.S. Eliot's great line "History is now and England" because it merged times, and linked time to place, anywhere. The "place" can be a country, a region, a particular house; but in the end it is the individual self ("it is I they build") - wherever that self finds an abounding, unselfish life. "The Moon in Lleyn" talks of people becoming pilgrims again, "if not to this place,/then to the recreation of it/in their own spirits". I had the inestimable delight of R.S. Thomas's friendship for over thirty years, and don't know of any major poet in whom the heroic honesty of the man is so close to the poetry, rich yet pellucid, on this question of identity.

This brings up at once R.S.'s forthright profile in all things. The public image is of a man holding "contradictory" even "untenable" positions. We would do him an injustice now to balk at that fact. It would be to lose sight of the things he stood for. Anyway, he himself furnished all the opportunities detractors need. No charismatic polemicist ever so neglected to defend his back. So let's concede some concessions. There is a contradiction between holding that the Welsh language is crucial and then marrying two non-Welsh speakers and having your only child educated outside Wales; in professing pacifism, yet seeming able to accept the loss of a life; in making the Welsh language a lifetime's agenda, yet writing the poems in English.

But even though he preferred to see first on entering a place of worship an altar not a pulpit, even at the altar this priest's mind was as much on the light slanting in from a side window as on "the untenanted cross" in front of him. The fact is that his sensibility was in counterpoint to both sides of the church/chapel divide. His famous phrase "Protestantism - the adroit castrator/Of art" is challenging exactly because we would have expected (it has often been misquoted as such) "Nonconformity - the adroit castrator..." For R.S., the glimpsed good place was not only pre-Nonconformist but pre-Anglican, too. He wanted to escape what Eliot called "a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares." Even in the 1950s he was prepared to think that Rome's emphasis on plainsong, on the splendour of the mass, and her incorporation of folk culture, may have got it right after all. And his excited reveries about the age of the pre-Cambrian rocks in Llyn at the end make the full context pre-historic, too.

It is in any case, philosophically, a nonsense to think that a truth is inseparable from its spokesman. There is also a strong likelihood that truth (as opposed to a quiet life) will be found at one of two extremes rather than in a misty middle. This guideline at least does honour to R.S.'s detractors, who have themselves gone to extremes, even without a cause. T.S. Eliot had the confidence to say publicly that so-and-so who had travestied his views on such-and-such couldn't have known him personally. R.S.'s private letters show the same sense of injury without rancour on the principle involved. He writes of being phoned by Dylan Iorwerth in 1988 for a reaction after some "devices" had been put through letter boxes in Cardiff. R.S. had not even heard the news but ventured that, given the very heavy sentences the activists would face, they had shown some kind of bravery. We now know how pungently his words were wafted on the journalistic breeze. More publicly, in his "Reflections on a Speech at Machynlleth" in these very pages in 1990, he had to urge that "If my speech was being recorded, it should have been an exact report of what I said." It was the same sorrow he felt on seeing his poetry endlessly misquoted.

Polemic was strengthened by important friendships across most able and distinguished generations in Wales (Euros Bowen, William Condry, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, Raymond Garlick, James Hanley, Emyr Humphreys, Saunders Lewis, Alwyn D. Rees). In turn, any cultural history of our time will be incomplete without recording the influence-through-friendship, the confidence-through-association, that R.S. extended to younger generations of writers in Wales for half a century. The poet's own horizons were widened by foreign travel to Denmark and Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Greece, Alaska, Catalunya, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and Egypt - he was at Luxor two days before the 1997 massacre. He was fond of quoting the old view that three pilgrimages to Enlli equalled one to Rome, even if pleased that jet travel had improved the equation. The ostensible aim was birdwatching, but one motivation never drives out another. "A Grave Unvisited" (Kierkegaard's in Copenhagen) was still a pilgrimage. "How close/need a shrine be to be too far...?" he asks in "Fugue for Ann Griffiths". And we know that south-west Ireland is noted for its bird life, but it is the survival there of Gaelic and of a simple religious faith that produced the lovely poem "Shrine at Cape Clear". It is a healthful function of poetry to mix motives.

The social standing-apart is matched by the at-an-angle texture of the poems. English-language poetry since 1950 has been shaped by the reaction of the 1950s "Movement" poets against Dylan Thomas (a blow against, and yet for Wales). But in relation to the "Movement" R.S. was a wonderfully free spirit: he sensed, quite rightly, that the only real poet to come out of it was Philip Larkin. If "moving" somewhere meant not writing as densely as Dylan, he didn't need to align with a clubbable London/Oxbridge movement to learn that. He was, after all, a year older than Dylan. He was his own "movement" - already alternative within an alternative culture. The first stylistic influence came from beyond Dylan's 1930s and beyond England, too. It was William Carlos Williams's metrical experiments in the 1920s with "variable" poetic feet and a line that was (Williams said, acknowledging Einstein) "only relatively stable". R.S's thematic concerns were hugely Welsh, but his poetic voice wasn't. It remains, however, a measure of his stature that he became a main influence on English poetry in Wales and beyond from the 1950s onwards. He developed early a sinuous short-lined free-verse that still answered, as "Movement" poetry did not, to the Modernist call for mythic power, and still allowed for the sharp corners of individual genius.