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The Man Who Went into the West The Life of R.S.Thomas by Rogers, Byron ( AUTHOR ) Jul-20-2007 Paperback
Presenting the life of one of 20th century English literature's greatest poets, this is a hilarious story of a singular man. Here the author unearths the story of R.S. Thomas's life, and that of his household - one both comic, absurd and touching.
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First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
Byron Rogers
18 books3 followersByron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. In August, 2007 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography published in the previous year, for The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of RS Thomas. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny."
Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do".
Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
June 8, 2013
This was... honestly, a bizarre read. R.S. Thomas seems to have been a man of contradictions -- funny, stern, hard, tender, quiet, garrulous. At one moment he's refusing to answer questions about his poems and the next, this:
This is a chatty sort of biography, and not a strictly organised one. I don't think Byron Rogers even tries to present some kind of unified view of Thomas. He makes it seem impossible, even. He made me laugh at Thomas and feel sorry for him, sometimes in the same moments, and he opened up his poetry to me that bit more in the ways he selected sections to quote.
I loved reading this, and I have a bizarre, amused love for R.S. Thomas. I don't know whether it would have appalled or tickled the man to know that a little English-speaking Welsh twenty-three year old like me feels this way about him: it's a tough call to make, it could go either way.
'Anyway, they wanted this scene in which Thomas came out of his church and walked down the path. Everything was set up and he appeared in a full surplice. But whether he'd become fed up, I don't know, for he suddenly raised his arms and started to run towards them, shouting, "I'm a bird, I'm a bird." It's not on film. Either the cameraman was too stunned or Thomas was running too fast.'
This is a chatty sort of biography, and not a strictly organised one. I don't think Byron Rogers even tries to present some kind of unified view of Thomas. He makes it seem impossible, even. He made me laugh at Thomas and feel sorry for him, sometimes in the same moments, and he opened up his poetry to me that bit more in the ways he selected sections to quote.
I loved reading this, and I have a bizarre, amused love for R.S. Thomas. I don't know whether it would have appalled or tickled the man to know that a little English-speaking Welsh twenty-three year old like me feels this way about him: it's a tough call to make, it could go either way.
February 12, 2020
I can't remember reading such an out-right entertaining biography before (not that I've read a large number) and certainly never one so funny which is a bit surprising considering the subject, a man many found forbidding, even a little scary. Yet Rogers finds the genuine comedy in the man's life as well as the humour Thomas displayed to the people who could get past the facade to the human underneath.
It seems like Thomas found it very difficult to express his emotions in any way other than through his poetry. This caused many problems, leaving his only child extremely bitter, for instance, and alienating many who he could not engage with on an intellectual front. Yet many of his parishioners found him endlessly patient and considerate in times of trouble, illness or bereavement. And so it goes on, developing a picture of a compicated man, full of contradictions, in search of something he never really found, that he probably couldn't name. Perhaps closest to it when bird watching, alone in a wild space.
Rogers, who knew Thomas, also offers helpful insight into the poetry and the social context of Wales in Thomas's lifetime, necessary to anything but a superficial understanding of the man. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in R.S. Thomas, the man or the poet, read this - it won't be a chore.
It seems like Thomas found it very difficult to express his emotions in any way other than through his poetry. This caused many problems, leaving his only child extremely bitter, for instance, and alienating many who he could not engage with on an intellectual front. Yet many of his parishioners found him endlessly patient and considerate in times of trouble, illness or bereavement. And so it goes on, developing a picture of a compicated man, full of contradictions, in search of something he never really found, that he probably couldn't name. Perhaps closest to it when bird watching, alone in a wild space.
Rogers, who knew Thomas, also offers helpful insight into the poetry and the social context of Wales in Thomas's lifetime, necessary to anything but a superficial understanding of the man. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in R.S. Thomas, the man or the poet, read this - it won't be a chore.
September 27, 2008
Byron Rogers, THE MAN WHO WENT INTO THE WEST: The Life of R.S. Thomas, Aurum Press, London, 2006
On Tuesday evening, for calm before bedtime I had picked up Penguin Modern Poets 1, a landmark in publishing and my own life, to relax with Elizabeth Jennings who was the filling between Lawrence Durrell and R.S. Thomas. Yet restlessly and with a feeling bordering on tasting forbidden pleasures, it was Thomas that I read before sleep. Then the next day I was lent this biography, and by Saturday morning I had finished it.
Something there is that works mysteriously with books and connections between writers and readers. My response to this book has to be oblique and personal. But it can be said that Rogers is a fine writer, that he is considerate of the reader and provides fluency of observations as rests between stopping points where one moves from the horizontal mode to that of vertical reflection. As a whole, the book is structured extremely carefully despite the plethora of randomly assembled bricolage his researches and own involvement uncovered. Like the Thomas households and the remains of their days, binbags full of writings, shoeboxes full of mummified mice and animal skulls, one brown envelope containg a dead prawn, the piles of often bizarre and wonderful details texture the underlying currents of life narratives: not one narrative, several, and of more than one person and more than one body, culminating in an exposition of Thomas’s unadorned humanity and love, and his relationship with God, or rather God’s presence in absence. Then a crazy, life-drenched coda of the poet’s last years, almost a resurrection in its capturing of a life lived backwards from bleakness to light. Though finally becoming ‘part of a community which disappeared’ (culmination of a search for Wales that did not exist but like God pulled him ever on), and part of pacifist campaigning, local campaigning, Nationalist politics (in a peripheral sense), and though all this is interesting, it is his poetry that matters most, and his poetry is part of a greater, final community. The couple of Ronni and Elsi (“A stranger couple would be hard to find outside of fiction,” one witness remarks) makes for a deep and unsentimental story of two who rarely seen to touch, loved the more not less because they lived together alone. This latter is brought from the poems of R.S. and the diaries of Elsi; the rest, the more gaudy aspects of strangeness, his infamous rudeness and arrogance, his emulation of the English upper middle classes, disdain, contempt, and so on are all there in the commentaries; so, too, the many, many accounts of his kindness, his wicked humour, his endurance, his patience and so on.
Some of the details astounded me. That he was a life-long needer of Valium, for instance, chronically shy. That his second wife (of whom I had never heard), “A smoking, swearing,drinking/fox-hunting female”, was attracted to him because he was “such a good-looking man, really sexy” (they lived in sin as octagenarians). But I need to know none of this, for most of all the book confirms, or rather goes some way, to explain my attachment to his poetry. And also, I no longer feel quite so guilty in having mixed feelings about Wales.
I’ve done the trips to Aberdaron, one of the 30,000 incoming tourists each year R.S. so despised. I have sat on a cliff reading his poems while looking over to Bardsey Island, trying to feel spiritual and deep. But last time I went there – I had borrowed a car – all plans to camp and commune with deeper reality evaporated into the sunday sun. Caravans, bungalows, commercial enticements, a dour gaggle of church-suited Walians clutching black-cased bibles (though R.S. would have approved of the black), roads too efficient, Spars too common… I couldn’t wait to get away. And that dislike I have always had of Wales (despite youthful joys in Rhyl, timid ascents of Snowdon and lustful nights in Abergele) is simply that of my dislike for everywhere else, yet hardened by contrast with the doom-chorded sentimentalised histories of the place. Anyway, the mind is its own place, and Thomas is not for me, the great Welsh poet. He is much beyond Wales, and the Man who went West travelled further than the edge of the Lleyn.
There was another man who made metaphor of the West, the American poet Robinson Jeffers. He who built by hand Tor Tower on the edge of the ‘final Pacific’ and turned his back on the dead East (a collection after a visit to Europe was entitled ‘Descent to the Dead’). Since I had, long ago written a thesis on Jeffers, I had assumed that the similarities I saw with Thomas were largely generic. yet nine months before his death, in an interview, Thomas was talking of God when he said, “I’ve been much influenced by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who says somewhere, ‘the people who talk of God in human terms, think of that!’” So, these connections I mentioned earlier between readers and writers and readers, matrices of coincidence, gifts ,and maybe inflections of love, have steered me now on a new course of exploration, and I can tell you some other poets we share.
In mornings it was Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard ( only a non-poet could argue they are philosophers), twin stars sharp with brilliance of intellect and contempt for turgid human constructions of the Divine or the Mysterious or the All. In passing, the biography gives away that Thomas judged his own work poorly against such a touchstone as Le Bateau Ivre: Rimbaud, that shatterer of human bounds and bonds yet master of the form of words. And Stevens, Wallace Stevens, perhaps the more important of all the poets to Thomas’s own formal project, Stevens the ultimate crafstman, artisan, and oblique carrier of the ungodded God, at once the Imagination, Coleridge’s primary imagination – there is a beautiful, wonderful description by Thomas of his own mystical rapture ‘alive with goldcrests’ – and the secondary imagination, of which Thomas wrote, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, “The nearest we can approach to God, he appears to say, is as creative beings.”
This has been such a wonderful experience for me, this almost holy, that I doubt my words are to be trusted as a recommendation just now. But I think it is worth risking an enthusiastic affirmation, not only of the book, the writer and the poet but of the call of wonder and the timeless gift of sharing.
On Tuesday evening, for calm before bedtime I had picked up Penguin Modern Poets 1, a landmark in publishing and my own life, to relax with Elizabeth Jennings who was the filling between Lawrence Durrell and R.S. Thomas. Yet restlessly and with a feeling bordering on tasting forbidden pleasures, it was Thomas that I read before sleep. Then the next day I was lent this biography, and by Saturday morning I had finished it.
Something there is that works mysteriously with books and connections between writers and readers. My response to this book has to be oblique and personal. But it can be said that Rogers is a fine writer, that he is considerate of the reader and provides fluency of observations as rests between stopping points where one moves from the horizontal mode to that of vertical reflection. As a whole, the book is structured extremely carefully despite the plethora of randomly assembled bricolage his researches and own involvement uncovered. Like the Thomas households and the remains of their days, binbags full of writings, shoeboxes full of mummified mice and animal skulls, one brown envelope containg a dead prawn, the piles of often bizarre and wonderful details texture the underlying currents of life narratives: not one narrative, several, and of more than one person and more than one body, culminating in an exposition of Thomas’s unadorned humanity and love, and his relationship with God, or rather God’s presence in absence. Then a crazy, life-drenched coda of the poet’s last years, almost a resurrection in its capturing of a life lived backwards from bleakness to light. Though finally becoming ‘part of a community which disappeared’ (culmination of a search for Wales that did not exist but like God pulled him ever on), and part of pacifist campaigning, local campaigning, Nationalist politics (in a peripheral sense), and though all this is interesting, it is his poetry that matters most, and his poetry is part of a greater, final community. The couple of Ronni and Elsi (“A stranger couple would be hard to find outside of fiction,” one witness remarks) makes for a deep and unsentimental story of two who rarely seen to touch, loved the more not less because they lived together alone. This latter is brought from the poems of R.S. and the diaries of Elsi; the rest, the more gaudy aspects of strangeness, his infamous rudeness and arrogance, his emulation of the English upper middle classes, disdain, contempt, and so on are all there in the commentaries; so, too, the many, many accounts of his kindness, his wicked humour, his endurance, his patience and so on.
Some of the details astounded me. That he was a life-long needer of Valium, for instance, chronically shy. That his second wife (of whom I had never heard), “A smoking, swearing,drinking/fox-hunting female”, was attracted to him because he was “such a good-looking man, really sexy” (they lived in sin as octagenarians). But I need to know none of this, for most of all the book confirms, or rather goes some way, to explain my attachment to his poetry. And also, I no longer feel quite so guilty in having mixed feelings about Wales.
I’ve done the trips to Aberdaron, one of the 30,000 incoming tourists each year R.S. so despised. I have sat on a cliff reading his poems while looking over to Bardsey Island, trying to feel spiritual and deep. But last time I went there – I had borrowed a car – all plans to camp and commune with deeper reality evaporated into the sunday sun. Caravans, bungalows, commercial enticements, a dour gaggle of church-suited Walians clutching black-cased bibles (though R.S. would have approved of the black), roads too efficient, Spars too common… I couldn’t wait to get away. And that dislike I have always had of Wales (despite youthful joys in Rhyl, timid ascents of Snowdon and lustful nights in Abergele) is simply that of my dislike for everywhere else, yet hardened by contrast with the doom-chorded sentimentalised histories of the place. Anyway, the mind is its own place, and Thomas is not for me, the great Welsh poet. He is much beyond Wales, and the Man who went West travelled further than the edge of the Lleyn.
There was another man who made metaphor of the West, the American poet Robinson Jeffers. He who built by hand Tor Tower on the edge of the ‘final Pacific’ and turned his back on the dead East (a collection after a visit to Europe was entitled ‘Descent to the Dead’). Since I had, long ago written a thesis on Jeffers, I had assumed that the similarities I saw with Thomas were largely generic. yet nine months before his death, in an interview, Thomas was talking of God when he said, “I’ve been much influenced by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who says somewhere, ‘the people who talk of God in human terms, think of that!’” So, these connections I mentioned earlier between readers and writers and readers, matrices of coincidence, gifts ,and maybe inflections of love, have steered me now on a new course of exploration, and I can tell you some other poets we share.
In mornings it was Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard ( only a non-poet could argue they are philosophers), twin stars sharp with brilliance of intellect and contempt for turgid human constructions of the Divine or the Mysterious or the All. In passing, the biography gives away that Thomas judged his own work poorly against such a touchstone as Le Bateau Ivre: Rimbaud, that shatterer of human bounds and bonds yet master of the form of words. And Stevens, Wallace Stevens, perhaps the more important of all the poets to Thomas’s own formal project, Stevens the ultimate crafstman, artisan, and oblique carrier of the ungodded God, at once the Imagination, Coleridge’s primary imagination – there is a beautiful, wonderful description by Thomas of his own mystical rapture ‘alive with goldcrests’ – and the secondary imagination, of which Thomas wrote, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, “The nearest we can approach to God, he appears to say, is as creative beings.”
This has been such a wonderful experience for me, this almost holy, that I doubt my words are to be trusted as a recommendation just now. But I think it is worth risking an enthusiastic affirmation, not only of the book, the writer and the poet but of the call of wonder and the timeless gift of sharing.
January 25, 2021
Part biography, part disquisition on the difficulty of biography. Part memoir, part literary appreciation. And - unexpectedly - often hilariously funny. Unreservedly recommended.
October 24, 2017
Wot larks! I just missed the Shipping Forecast, devouring the last pages. Love Byron Rogers’ writing and this occasionally hilarious story of the Thomases.
I first met RS Thomas’ work in the Penguin New Writers book in the school library, and Welsh Landscape was the first poem I memorised (and illustrated, for that matter; gave it to my dad, who recognised the source. ....I read Bright Field to him when we met for the last time...) ...this is anecdote rather than review, I know, so it goes.
I first met RS Thomas’ work in the Penguin New Writers book in the school library, and Welsh Landscape was the first poem I memorised (and illustrated, for that matter; gave it to my dad, who recognised the source. ....I read Bright Field to him when we met for the last time...) ...this is anecdote rather than review, I know, so it goes.
January 13, 2014
If RS Thomas had been born a bit later and without his crippling misanthropy, he'd have been a first-class stand-up. This book reveals a man who wrote some of the most moving poetry I know, but who also had an undiscovered talent for performance art. Confronted with other human beings, RS Thomas could behave with such appalling rudeness that this book is a joy for anyone with a single subversive fibre in their body. It was easily the funniest book I read all year, yet still conveyed the mastery Thomas had over a language he hated (while acknowledging the damage Thomas did to those who loved him).
If you love poetry or the comedy of embarrassment, step right up. If you love both, this will be catnip.
If you love poetry or the comedy of embarrassment, step right up. If you love both, this will be catnip.
August 26, 2012
A beautifully written biography of a man who could be (and to many was) cold and unlovable, yet who wrote some of the finest poetry of the last century. If you find lines like this thrilling (as I do):"To live in Wales is to be conscious/At dusk of the spilled blood/That went to the making of the wild sky/Dyeing the immaculate rivers/In all their courses./It is to be aware,/Above the noisy tractor/And hum of the machine/Of strife in the strung woods,/Vibrant with sped arrows.', then you should buy both Byron Rogers' masterly biography - packed with humour and compassion and insight - and get hold of R S Thomas's Selected Poems.
July 19, 2010
With biographies it's always difficult to distinguish between the author and the subject. Maybe that is particularly so with this biography. The subject, one of the greatest of modern Welsh poets, was a complex one and almost certainly difficult to live with. But the author has succeeded in bringing his subject to life in such a way that we get a glimpse both of his greatness and his flaws. An excellent read.
September 1, 2020
The book evokes the Wales I knew in childhood summers, including the smells of damp moss, bracken, hedgerows and rain, pine trees on the walk to the beach, and collecting milk from the neighbouring farm. We were among the tourists disliked by R S Thomas, for understandable reasons, and it was helpful as an adult now to read about the non-tourist life of Wales, although it is clear that R S Thomas' view of life was not a typical one, or more to the point, his life and views were often not those of most the people around him. Fascinating to have a glimpse into a life with so many contrasts, challenges and paradoxes, both for the man himself and for his family and friends, told with affection, honesty, sympathy and humour. It certainly helped me to appreciate and I hope understand his poetry with a different 'ear'.
September 2, 2013
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, as someone who has an A-level in English literature, has always read voraciously and lived in North Wales for three years, but I'd never heard of R.S. Thomas. What an interesting character. I think that poets, more than novelists, are prone to having their soul pulled out and analysed because each of their poems reveals something about them. Byron Rogers tries his best, but I don't think that he managed to tell us much about the man underneath the public persona. The has evidence from those who liked him and lots of evidence from those who disliked him and lots of anecdotal stuff, but it doesn't really feel like he got the measure of the man. I'm not sure the man wanted to be measured.
A really interesting read. I'm glad I found the book on my Kindle when my sister returned it :)
A really interesting read. I'm glad I found the book on my Kindle when my sister returned it :)
May 10, 2019
Astonishing. Funny. Actually riotously funny. And a loving, inciteful and tender portrait of a genius.
I love the poetry of RS. I've owned this biography for several years, but not read it. Partially for fear of dimming my respect for his work. Partially as I have always thought an artist's work should be considered apart from musings about the creator.
But this book is wonderful. It is a portrait of a human. Rich, full of faults and real. Thoroughly recommend as a work of biography and an introduction to RS if you've yet to discover his poetry.
I love the poetry of RS. I've owned this biography for several years, but not read it. Partially for fear of dimming my respect for his work. Partially as I have always thought an artist's work should be considered apart from musings about the creator.
But this book is wonderful. It is a portrait of a human. Rich, full of faults and real. Thoroughly recommend as a work of biography and an introduction to RS if you've yet to discover his poetry.
August 28, 2021
1.5 Not sure who the target demographic of this book is but it definitely wasnt me (had to read for uni otherwise would have DNF’d)
Read
June 19, 2020What a strange man...I had a hard time wrapping my head around who R.S. Thomas was, probably because that was part of who he was. Taciturn yet witty, erudite English accent yet a fiery proponent of Welsh language and identity, married yet often in solitude, a poet yet often strangely unmoved by beauty, a clergyman yet a skeptic, downright bluntly mean to people yet remembered by individuals fondly. Byron Rogers does a good job of working with the material he has.
I wish the biography had spent more time analyzing Thomas’ poetry and digging into Thomas’ evolution as a writer. It spent a lot of time trying to come to grips with who Thomas even was, which, as I said before, is understandable. I haven’t read much of Thomas’ poetry, but now I’m eager to get my hands on it. The poetry that is in the biography is beautiful with that spare evocative use of language that I love in poetry. My main confusion with R.S. Thomas is that we know so little of his inner life, yet he must have had a tremendous one given the capacity of his poetry. I guess it is the poetry itself that gives us a glimpse into that inner landscape that Thomas otherwise kept private.
I enjoyed getting a glimpse into Welsh life in the 20th century. I don’t know much about Wales despite having been there in 2008. I was in Aberystwyth, which is near one of Thomas’s parishes and was mentioned numerous times, so that was a fun connection. I have good memories of the immense beauty of Wales, so beautiful as to almost be mythical, so I can understand Thomas’ bone deep connection with the land and his militant desire to protect it. (Despite being a pacifist, militant seems a good word to describe Thomas.)
I like that Thomas was a birdwatcher. It adds to his eccentric personality, as he could rather be a bird himself, fleetingly glimpsed and impossible to ignore.
I wish the biography had spent more time analyzing Thomas’ poetry and digging into Thomas’ evolution as a writer. It spent a lot of time trying to come to grips with who Thomas even was, which, as I said before, is understandable. I haven’t read much of Thomas’ poetry, but now I’m eager to get my hands on it. The poetry that is in the biography is beautiful with that spare evocative use of language that I love in poetry. My main confusion with R.S. Thomas is that we know so little of his inner life, yet he must have had a tremendous one given the capacity of his poetry. I guess it is the poetry itself that gives us a glimpse into that inner landscape that Thomas otherwise kept private.
I enjoyed getting a glimpse into Welsh life in the 20th century. I don’t know much about Wales despite having been there in 2008. I was in Aberystwyth, which is near one of Thomas’s parishes and was mentioned numerous times, so that was a fun connection. I have good memories of the immense beauty of Wales, so beautiful as to almost be mythical, so I can understand Thomas’ bone deep connection with the land and his militant desire to protect it. (Despite being a pacifist, militant seems a good word to describe Thomas.)
I like that Thomas was a birdwatcher. It adds to his eccentric personality, as he could rather be a bird himself, fleetingly glimpsed and impossible to ignore.
September 12, 2020
This biography is so stylish and a revelation of the remarkable life and character of an eccentric and unfathomable poetic titan. I was not that familiar with Thomas’ work although I have been to the church at Aberdaron where he was vicar. Rogers has unearthed a goldmine of material which he has collated with expertise and exquisite judgement in order to furnish a spellbinding narrative full of unexpected views and mysterious pathways. The poet’s private persona, a life of strange manners and utterances, emerges alongside many wonderful quotations from the poetry that he wrote with iron discipline and in prodigious quantities. Thomas’ themes deal with the big questions in work of granitic beauty and at times overwhelming tenderness. His wife Elsi a gifted painter was faithful in her support, and her dedication and appreciation of silence and austerity chimed fortuitously with his obsessions and psychological fervour in pursuit of the pure Welsh cultural identity.
This delightful volume in its portraits of the chief players in this drama, testifies to life’s unpredictability, its grey areas which steadfastly refute the tunnel vision of an uncompromising moral absolutism that is strangling the variety and spontaneity of our contemporary world.
This delightful volume in its portraits of the chief players in this drama, testifies to life’s unpredictability, its grey areas which steadfastly refute the tunnel vision of an uncompromising moral absolutism that is strangling the variety and spontaneity of our contemporary world.
January 15, 2025
An excellent biography of a very complex and contradictory man. A Church of Wales clergyman his whole working life (though the book clearly shows that the ‘work’ was very light), his notion of God would have seen him burnt at the stake in earlier times, and on retirement he ‘lived in sin’. A lover of all things Welsh, especially the language, who only spoke English at home and made no attempt to teach his wife and son. A trumpet blower for his own poetry whilst being dismissive of practically all contemporary Welsh poets. A despiser of English tourists, but almost a sycophant to English toffs. A Welsh Nationalist with little time for many Welsh people….
I could go on in this vein, but I’m sure you get the gist. He was also considered by many who came across him as a cold fish, but the book has quotes galore from people with a different view. His treatment of his own family was not good, and his son appears to have been particularly affected, but he undoubtedly loved them. I spent half the book wondering how Byron Rogers could write early on that he had ‘taken to him’, but in the second half I took to him myself more and more.
All I have to do now is to get to grips with his poetry!
I could go on in this vein, but I’m sure you get the gist. He was also considered by many who came across him as a cold fish, but the book has quotes galore from people with a different view. His treatment of his own family was not good, and his son appears to have been particularly affected, but he undoubtedly loved them. I spent half the book wondering how Byron Rogers could write early on that he had ‘taken to him’, but in the second half I took to him myself more and more.
All I have to do now is to get to grips with his poetry!
July 13, 2023
In some respects I'd rate this 3*. Whilst it gives a fascinating insight to RS Thomas, I think it plays too much on humour and his 'eccentricities'. I think it's very bizarre to watch a ball hit over a net for hours on end, but the BBC would have us think that is normal. I wish less had been made of the relationship with Elsi. Who was the difficult person to live with, RS or Elsi. My conclusion would be that they were not a marriage made in heaven. Too much credence is given to the comments from their son. But, well worth a read, but don't always believe everything you read. Think and interpret.
June 5, 2025
This was so entertaining and thought provoking. For the bulk of the book Thomas comes over as a solitary and sardonic deep thinker out of his time who likes acting the part of an old misery guts. He is full of contradictions and there are some very funny anecdotes.
He seems to have transformed dramatically in the last decade of his life into someone more carefree and sociable when he remarried and I would have liked to learn much more about this period but the author rushes through it in just a few pages which jars somewhat. This was a time when Thomas continued to write prolifically but it's just skirted over and I can't help wondering why.
He seems to have transformed dramatically in the last decade of his life into someone more carefree and sociable when he remarried and I would have liked to learn much more about this period but the author rushes through it in just a few pages which jars somewhat. This was a time when Thomas continued to write prolifically but it's just skirted over and I can't help wondering why.
February 4, 2025
This is a wonderfully readable biography of one of the greatest poets of our age, given weight by both the author's poetic prose and the fact he knew his subject personally. It is perhaps unfortunate that Thomas comes across as not only peculiar but in some ways hypocritical, a fierce Welsh nationalist who courted the English middle class and is described by more than one acquaintance as a snob. Damn fine poetry though.
October 8, 2022
One of the best Biographies I have read.R S Thomas was an absolute mass of contradictions , almost impossible to pin down but Byron Rogers has done a great job with this book , and it's funny " Call me Ronaldo....' who knew ? Highly recommended, even if you have just a passing interest.
March 23, 2024
A rollicking good read about my favourite grumpy Welsh vicar.
R.S. Thomas was an outstanding and prolific poet, and should've bagged the Nobel Prize for Literature instead of it going to Seamus Heaney.
Byron Rogers does a great job in this biography. Worth a re-read, methinks.
R.S. Thomas was an outstanding and prolific poet, and should've bagged the Nobel Prize for Literature instead of it going to Seamus Heaney.
Byron Rogers does a great job in this biography. Worth a re-read, methinks.
September 2, 2025
Picked this up after reading the satirist Craig Brown writing in the Sunday Times Book Reviews: “Byron Rogers’s ‘The Manager Who Went into the West’ must be the most enjoyable biography ever written”.
I’m a bit of a sucker for biographies of poets but I have to say, I think Brown may be right!
I’m a bit of a sucker for biographies of poets but I have to say, I think Brown may be right!
October 14, 2025
Craig Brown called this "The most enjoyable biography ever written." It could be. I enjoyed the book immensely and have recommended it to several friends.
My blog:
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...
My blog:
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...
October 26, 2025
Profoundly philosophical, poetical, and drily humorous? How could this be when the subject was so unattractive - or so it appeared. A beautiful evocation of North West Wales and lives and times that could never be repeated.
April 11, 2019
From reading some of RS Thomas' poetry I really wanted to know more about the person and was delighted to chance upon this book. It was a fascinating and to me unexpected read.
March 6, 2018
Gossipy, entertaining and revealing. R.S.Thomas would probably have hated it. But though it's very far from being a hagiography, it's a sympathetic portrait.
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June 20, 2019Excellent!
July 11, 2020
Doesn't cover the areas of thomas's work I'm most interested in (religion and technology) in much depth but an engaging and witty biography. worth the read
July 14, 2023
Solid biography of a poet revered in the UK and mostly ignored here.
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December 10, 2023Very enjoyable. I'm glad I wasn't married to him.
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December 22, 2020If being eccentric is very British, then. R.S. thomas certainly is. A Welsh nationalist who speaks with an aristocratic English drawl. Who yearns to express himself in Welsh, but only has the words for it in English. He loved nature, and had an uncomfortable relationship with his parishioners. Essentially unknowable, except through his poems. As a biography, it is a triumph, full of rich descriptions by people who knew him and in their diversity reflect him.
Beautiful links to Lewis (God sang creation into being), and Dorothy Sayers (man comes closest to God in creating).
Beautiful links to Lewis (God sang creation into being), and Dorothy Sayers (man comes closest to God in creating).
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