R. S. Thomas and the Poetics of Incarnation

The incarnation has become a multifaceted concept across the fields of theology, philosophy and language theory. It is approached in this thesis as a guiding theme for a comprehensive reading of R.S. Thomas's poetry through different stages of his six-decade writing career. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part offers an outline of how the Incarnation as a Christian mystery developed into a concept with various intellectual implications. Against the background of the different notions about the incarnation, the thesis seeks to explore Thomas's individual understanding of the concept based on his words on the topic in an interview with the researcher Simon Barker in 1983. This part also shows that the incarnation is deeply connected with Thomas's theory of language, his ideal of poetic language and also his own poetry.;The second part of the thesis focuses on a reading of Thomas's poetry that follows the trajectory of development of his poetics of incarnation. It is found that the incarnation, in its different meanings for him as spirit informing and inhabiting the flesh, divine revelation and embodied Word, is an important source of tension between the poet-priest's religious vision and his experience with modern reality. The significance of this tension throughout Thomas's oeuvre is attributed to the poet's focus on the present life of man and the material world. This thesis argues that the incarnation allows the poet not only to celebrate the beauty and revelation accessible to human beings, but also to embrace the tension brought by a secularized modern world. Finally, it will be argued that Thomas's poetry becomes a manifestation of the incarnation, in the sense of it being a medium for the Word to come into contact with the contemporary human world.