Skip to main content

Distributed for University of Wales Press

Transatlantic Vistas

Engagements with the Literatures of Wales and the United States

An edited collection of essays, interviews, and book reviews by M. Wynn Thomas.

For more than half a century, M. Wynn Thomas has been Wales’s foremost literary critic. His ground-breaking work—on subjects ranging from Welsh Puritanism to Walt Whitman, from religious Dissent to contemporary poetry—has opened up new vistas and literary correspondences for his readers. Thomas’s writings combine a deep historical knowledge, a commitment to pluralism, and a relationship to the literary text that is both sympathetic in approach and detailed in analysis. 

Made up of previously unpublished and uncollected essays, interviews, and reviews on Welsh and American writers, the essays in Transatlantic Vistas engage with some of the abiding interests of Thomas’s career: Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas, and American authors such as Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Anne Stevenson, and more. Including a foreword by Helen Vendler and essays by Daniel G. Williams and Kirsti Bohata, this volume celebrates M. Wynn Thomas’s immense contribution as a literary and intellectual historian, critic, translator, lecturer, institution builder, editor, broadcaster, and literary executor as he enters his eightieth year.

408 pages | 1 halftone | 5.43 x 8.5 | © 2024

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature, British and Irish Literature


University of Wales Press image

View all books from University of Wales Press

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Helen Vendler

Introduction by Daniel G. Williams

On Walt Whitman
‘Till I hit upon a name’: Calamus and the language of love

Whitman and the Labouring Classes

States United and United States: Whitman’s national vision in 1855

Whitman, Tennyson, and the poetry of old age

The pioneer: D. H. Lawrence’s Whitman.


On Dylan Thomas
‘A Sweet Union?’: Dylan Thomas and Post-War American Poetry.

‘There’s words’: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and language

On R. S. Thomas

The Real Manafon of R. S. Thomas

Bury My Heart: R. S. Thomas and Native America

Interviews
Rita Dove
Jorie Graham
Helen Vendler

Reviews
Dannie Abse
Charles Bukowski
Jorie Graham
Geoffrey Hill
Gwyneth Lewis
W. S. Merwin
Sharon Olds
Keidrych Rhys
Anne Stevenson

Afterword by Kirsti Bohata

Bibliography of M. Wynn Thomas since 2004

Index

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press