Too Brave to Dream: Encounters with Modern Art
- Submitting institution
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Bangor University / Prifysgol Bangor
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- UoA26_58
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloodaxe Books
- ISBN
- 9781780373072
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is an edited collection of 37 previously unknown ekphrastic poems by the major twentieth-century poet R.S. Thomas. The poems were discovered by the Editors, who are the Co-Directors of the R.S. Thomas Research Centre at Bangor University, the leading archive for the study of the poet’s work. My research contribution to the volume – shared equally with the Co-Editor – was substantial, and included: (1) transcribing and editing the manuscript poems, and pairing the texts with the reproductions of the artworks to which they respond; (2) writing the 8,000-word Introduction, and (3) providing the critical apparatus for the poems, including substantive textual and critical annotations. The Introduction draws upon extensive research on the unpublished work of R.S. Thomas, together with that of his wife, the artist M.E. Eldridge, including further unpublished poems, correspondence, private journals, autobiographical writings, and family papers. The critical intervention of this research, as presented in the Introduction, is significant. This previously unknown body of work is shown to be among the most sophisticated expressions of several of Thomas’s major thematic concerns: the nature of suffering, for example (in particular in relation to war), and issues of personal identity. The influence on the poet of M.E. Eldridge’s work is here reassessed and is shown to have been transformative, especially with regard to Thomas’s early work. In addition, new light is cast on the longevity and utter centrality – most notably during a period of deep personal crisis – of the ekphrastic mode in the poet’s oeuvre. The project thus brings to light, and elucidates, a collection of poetry that takes its place among the most significant and revealing works of this major twentieth-century writer.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
