Turning Aside From "the Singing Machine": Reification And Religious Salvation In R.S. Thomas’s Poetry

As one of the finest Welsh poets writing in English in the twentieth century,Ronald Stuart Thomas(1913-2000)is widely extolled for his poetry which is bleak,terse,bitter,but at the same time beautiful and visionary.This prolific poet had a rather long poetic career,during which he had published more than fifty books of poetry and prose,and had won multiple poetry awards,including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry,Welsh Arts Council’s Literature Award,and the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Art.He was also nominated for the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.R.S.Thomas was adept at various poetic subjects,such as nature,rustic life,love and marriage,science and technology,and religion.Among these what makes him particularly well-known is his perennial obsession with "the machine",an image which threads his medium-term and late poems and has attracted a considerable amount of critical attention.In a nutshell,the existing criticism usually interprets "the machine" as a symbol of applied science or technology,which has exerted disastrous effects on nature,environment and man.However,these critiques mainly focus on the symptoms of "the machine",and fail to reveal the entrenched causes that have contributed to them.The aim of this thesis then,as a thematic study of R.S.Thomas’s "machine" poems,is to uncover the social,economic and political implications of "the machine".Drawing upon Western Marxism,the thesis argues that "the machine" is de facto a symbol of the phenomenon of reification that accompanies the industrialization and mechanization in rural Wales.It epitomizes,in the first place,the reification of modern man,in the process of which man has been instrumentalized and has become passive and contemplative under the influence of the ongoing rationalization in capitalist society.Besides,it also symbolizes the reification of man’s consciousness,in the process of which the reified mind has accepted the alienated relations between men and commodities as natural and universal,and has,in order to perpetuate those relations,accordingly established the whole capitalist system harmonizing with its economic base.This phenomenon of reification has brutally dehumanizing effects on humans,and that is what R.S.Thomas vehemently denounces in his poems,although sometimes he may go to extremes.The thesis also expounds that R.S.Thomas’s proposed salvation from "the machine" is essentially a religious one,that is,to be liberated from the tightening grasp of reification,one has to "turn aside" from time(which leads to "the machine")into the space of nature,which is imbued with the reflection of God,and in which one can experience a reunion with the Divine and reacquire the Christian faith.The thesis finally concludes that though R.S.Thomas believes in and practices his ideal,which is his own "Great Refusal",this religious salvation is doomed to fail on the collective level in contemporary capitalist society.