Online Zoom Forum: R S Thomas: The Spiritual, Ecological and Social Vision in His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 11 November 2026.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 15 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Donald Smith:
Bio: Donald Smith is founding Director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre and of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.
Donald Smith is a noted storyteller and performance poet in his own right, novelist, and playwright; and has authored a succession of books about Scottish culture, including Storytelling Scotland (2001) and Freedom and Faith (2013).
From 2012 to 2023 he was CEO of TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland).
(Donald was born in Glasgow to an Irish mother, and was brought up in Church of Scotland manses in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling.
In 2023 he was honoured to receive the Hamish Henderson Award for lifetime achievement.
Speakers:
Prof Przemyslaw Michalski:
Title: Ecology and/as Spirituality in the Poetry of Roland Stuart Thomas.
Description: In my presentation, I will focus on a handful of R.S. Thomas’s poems in which ecological and spiritual concerns meet and interanimate one another. In his most epiphanic poems, Thomas writes of nature as a locus of the divine; at the same time, as a passionate advocate for the preservation of natural habitats, especially avian ecosystems, he also wrote poems in which purely ecological concerns come to the fore. As a lover of nature and a Welsh patriot, he often denounced “the Machine” – his metonymic shorthand for all forms of man-made depredations against the world of nature. In the poems where his ecological concerns and spiritual interests intersect, Thomas sees nature as threatened not only in its material existence but also in its capacity as a site of divine self-manifestation.
Bio: Przemyslaw Michalski studied English literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He has published articles on the Metaphysical Poets, G. M. Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, R. S. Thomas, Ian McEwan, Philip Larkin, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Audrey Magee, Kate Chopin, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, Franz Kafka, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czeslaw Milosz. He has written two books: The Problem of Mysticism in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2013) and “No friendly God..."? (Self-)manifestations of the Divine in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas (2016). He is an assistant professor at the University of the National Education Commission in Kraków, where he teaches English literature.
Dr Neal Alexander:
Title: R.S. Thomas and Nuclear Disaster.
Description: This talk will explore a crucial, but largely neglected aspect of R.S. Thomas’s later poetry and prose: his appalled fascination with the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear power during the final decades of the twentieth century. Late in life, following his retirement as vicar of Aberdaron in 1978, Thomas participated in many anti-nuclear protests and was a founding member of the Dwyfor branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This political activism, which is entangled with his Welsh nationalism and environmentalism, leaves its mark on his writing in a surprising variety of ways. At times, Thomas’s morbid obsession with the idea of nuclear disaster is evident at the level of theme, content, and polemical style. At others, it is more diffusely apparent in the language and imagery that the poems employ while ostensibly speaking of other things. In particular, Thomas’s theological poetry is often deeply infused with nuclear tropes, so that his explorations of the nature of God and Biblical narratives are refracted through his earthly preoccupations as a CND campaigner and resident of north Wales.
Bio: Neal Alexander is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place (2022) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies (2024). With Jamie Harris, he is writing a book on Welsh writing, energy, and climate crisis.
Prof Christopher Southgate:
Title: R.S. Thomas and the Sciences: A Love-hate Fascination.
Description: This talk will explore R.S. Thomas highly ambiguous relationship with the sciences and scientific vocabulary. The poet’s celebration of the new physics can be contrasted with his profound suspicion of the way applied science has given rise to dehumanising technologies, which he nicknames ‘the Machine’. In terms of vocabulary and imagery Thomas both arraigns science for having ‘made God small/setting him astride/a pipette or a retort’ and complains that ‘Tri-cyano-aminopropene -/it is our new form of prayer’, yet he can also suppose that God says ‘Come/to me by numbers and figures; see my beauty.in the angles between stars’.
Bio: Dr Christopher Southgate is Professor of Christian Theodicy at the University of Exeter, where he has taught since 1993. His first training was as a research biochemist, and he has explored the theological problem of suffering in the non-human creation in a series of books from The Groaning of Creation (2008) on. He explores R.S. Thomas in a chapter of his 2018 monograph Theology in a Suffering World: Glory and Longing. He is also a much-published poet and the author of a verse biography of T.S. Eliot, A Love and its Sounding.
Prof Matthew Wickman:
Title: ‘The Cross Always Is Avant-Garde’: A View from Two Poems.
Description: ‘The Cross always is avant-garde’ is one of R. S. Thomas’s provocative and enigmatic statements about the nature of religious and spiritual life. It’s the concluding line of a short passage in which Thomas appears to rail against the derelict state of modernity. And yet, the very term ‘avant-garde’ speaks to art forms we do not yet know how to categorize, art that is ultra-modern: too late for our innocence and too early for our understanding. For Thomas, divine manifestation typically bears this anachronistic quality, arriving too early and too late. But this untimeliness also renders it most powerful. We will explore how this is so through two Thomas poems from both ends of his career, one early and one late.
Bio: Matthew Wickman holds the University Professorship of English, an endowed chair, at Brigham Young University. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, an edited volume, the spiritual memoir Life to the Whole Being, more than fifty articles and book chapters, and the forthcoming book On Christian Poetry and Spiritual Style. He presently serves as co-chair of the Christian Spirituality Unit for the American Academy of Religion, editor of the academic journal Literature and Belief, and host of the ecumenical Faith and Imagination podcast, a series of conversations with scholars and creative writers about the intersection of intellectual, religious, and spiritual life.
Dr. Daniel Westover:
Title: Thirteen Blackbirds Looking at R. S. Thomas.
Description: R. S. Thomas was a keen watcher of birds. Throughout his poetry, birds carry deep time within them, and their songs are laden with the griefs of every age. They also intimate a divine presence while questioning humanity’s anthropocentric assumptions. In ‘Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man’, Thomas imagines what might happen when the birds look back. His response to Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ places a man in the blackbirds’ garden, where he becomes a ridiculous but threatening intruder, his capacity for destruction belying his apparent absurdity. My remarks read this poem as a way into Thomas’s concerns with humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman, particularly our insistence on placing ourselves at the centre of the garden, the hubris this entails and our capacity to ‘incubate’ solutions that threaten our own extinction.
Bio: Daniel Westover is the author of R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography and co-editor of two books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Fire that Breaks: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetic Legacies. His chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wales was published in Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context (Cambridge), and his essay on Dylan Thomas is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Welsh Literature. Daniel has two new books forthcoming: New Approaches to R. S. Thomas (University of Wales Press) and ConveRSe: Reflections on R. S. Thomas, Self, Nation and Spirit (y Lolfa). He is Chair of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
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