A Peculiar Welsh Poet Writing In English

Ronald Stuart Thomas is a great Welsh poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He is a country vicar, spending all his life in the Welsh rural areas, and a prolific poet. During more than fifty years of writing career, R. S. Thomas has had twenty-eight collections of poetry published, around 1600 poems. He has been awarded a variety of prizes, such as the Heinemann Award, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and a number of Welsh poetry prizes. In 1996 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetry can be divided into two stages. At the first stage, he wrote mainly pastoral poems, which are the object of this paper, on Welsh peasants, rural landscape, history and culture; the second stage mainly consists of his poems on religion, which brought him reputation as a poet, for which he is known as a"religious poet".R.S. Thomas is a patriotic poet with strong national consciousness. Confronted with the descending Welsh culture, he took an active part in the renaissance of Welsh culture and tradition. Anxiety and concern about the future of Welsh culture run through his early poetry. The particular experiences and cultural background mark his poetry out in the poetical history of the twentieth century. However, R. S. Thomas has not been introduced or translated much in China so far. Based on this understanding, the author of this paper deems it her duty to draw Chinese readers'attention to his poems, to enjoy the freshness he brings, thereby to throw some light on the revitalization of one's native culture. Analyses of this paper are drawn from the theory of defamiliarization.This paper is composed of seven parts. The introduction tells the reason and aim of the author in writing this paper, the method applied and the general idea of each part. The first chapter comments on the research in and outside China in detail, with the achievements as well as the defects. Most of the researches so far are just sentimental analysis, without enough support in theory and lacking in depth. Chapter Two introduces the theory of defamiliarization, its origin, introduction, features, limits and significance. The idea of defamiliarization had a long history before Victor Shklovsky...