“I imagine he intended other things…” Ronald Stuart Thomas and Edgar Degas
“I imagine he intended other things…” Ronald Stuart Thomas and Edgar Degas

Summary/Abstract: Every critic commenting on the work of the Welsh priest-poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000) is immediately confronted with the problem of overwhelming abundance – whatever the theme, whether the poet wrestles with the thorny question of God’s alleged disappearance from the horizon of human thought, debunks the myth of Welsh peasants living serenely in tune with nature, or comments on the unsettling implications of scientific investigations for religion, the sheer scope of material compels one to carve out a small cluster of poems for analysis. This is also true about one relatively little known group of his oeuvre – his ekphrastic poems. That is why, for reasons of time and space, this essay focuses on Thomas’s poems on paintings by the French artist Edgar Degas. It tries to examine the strategies employed by the Welsh poet in the hope of negotiating the distance between the sphere of visual art and its representation in language. The article also addresses the question of why Thomas is so persistent in trying to tease out from the paintings various implications which transcend the realm of pure description.

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