There have been three notable poetical Thomases in our century: Edward, meditative pastoralist (and boon companion to Robert Frost), who died in the Great War; the mercurial Dylan, whose reputation has been sustained in part by the tawdry legend of his life; and R. S., Wales’s greatest living poet, who turned eighty this spring and whose birthday was marked by the publication of his Collected Poems, 1940-1990.

Though all of Welsh derivation, none of these men was Welsh-speaking—and to all but R. S. it seems to have mattered little that the tongue of their forefathers was not their own. The Welshness of Dylan, according to many (and perhaps unfairly), found its principal outlet in his life. It is, of course, highly visible in his prose too—the marvelous reminiscences of his Swansea childhood, for example, that he recorded for BBC radio in the 1940s; and in Under Milk Wood, of course, that sole attempt that he made, so late on in his short life, to write a play for radio. But in the poetry? Formally, certainly, in the intricate patterning of rhyme structure and meter; but less so in the matter and the language of the poems, which so often depend for their success upon an uncanny vatic force that is not especially Welsh because, in the opinion of R. S., the Welsh are not much inclined to mysticism anyway. Their spirituality resides in their surroundings: