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This Autumn marks the tenth anniversary of the death of RS Thomas. His obituaries portray an enigmatic personality replete with contradictions: a misanthropic Christian, a champion of Welsh who wrote poetry in English, a nationalist who didn’t think much of his fellow Welshmen, an undemonstrative man who could write impassioned verse. The title of his first biography, by Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors is telling. Despite Wintle’s assiduousness one finished the book conscious that the interiors of Thomas’s personality, furious or not, remained largely hidden.

However, a biography written since his death, in 2006, The Man Who Went Into the West by Byron Rogers, is far more successful: this elusive quarry is tracked, and if not captured, is certainly cornered. This must be partly down to Rogers being as familiar with Thomas’s context and a good part of his subject matter as the poet himself: Rogers is a Welsh-speaking son of a Carmarthen farming family. What’s more, Wintle was too straightforwardly ingenuous. Rogers, on the other hand, has a sidelong, mischievous approach, anecdotal and full of asides, ironies, and sly observations; fully aware of the absurd. It seems to catch a crafty, taciturn Welshman, it’s best to set on him a crafty, garrulous one.

It’s an amusing book with some vignettes that threaten to tip over into the fully comic (incredibly, a BBC producer who’d spent time with Thomas claimed he’d met three truly funny men in his life: Lenny Bruce, Ken Dodd…and RS Thomas). Rogers had known Thomas for many years, another strength.

Some characteristic themes emerge. His houses are always cold, literally close to freezing (when he and his artist wife rented out their retirement cottage, all the new tenant had to do to get a council house was invite social services to inspect his current dwelling). Rogers quotes from an earlier interview he’d conducted with the poet, who was generous with his time and tolerant of the published article’s detractions:

The house is cold, even austere. Cold pastels, pale waxed wood, the white skulls of sheep and dogs laid on a bleached oak chest, [his wife] Miss Eldridge’s pale fantasies in oil and watercolour, and, in one of the drawing rooms, the feathers and bodies of dead birds which both Thomases have picked up, and preserved, so a burglar might think himself in the house of a taxidermist with an artistic bent. In one of his poems Thomas had written about the ‘strict palate’ and the ‘simple house’, but after a half-hour of trying to be Heathcliff I asked whether we might have the second bar of the electric fire. He smiled, which is to say his lips curved suddenly downward. ‘My wife always says people would freeze in our house’.

A pretty good cameo of Thomas, that: austereness, to the point of mild sado-masochism, leavened somewhat by humour. He was capable of personal kindnesses – sometimes to painstaking lengths – but regularly displayed a misanthropy that ran deep. Rogers describes him as a ‘playful ogre’, an oxymoron that helps reconcile his contradictions.

He was also much more artfully self-conscious in the construction of a persona than one would have guessed (that house could have come out of World of Interiors). He was even something of a fake: he spoke English (his first language) with an implausible cut-glass accent, originally adopted to annoy Welsh nationalist students at Bangor; he seemed to feel most comfortable socialising with the English upper middle classes and was a snob; he sent his reluctant son off to an English boarding school and didn’t seem bothered that he never learnt Welsh. These all seem highly unlikely revelations to anyone who’s read the poetry, which is quoted throughout. Hypocrisy? Probably. And also a reminder that art is mysteriously capable of utterly transcending personality.

Perhaps one of the most striking conclusions to be drawn from the book is that this determinedly taciturn, undemonstrative and non-tactile clergyman was quite probably one of the greatest love poets of recent times. Rogers reckons the poem below, written about his first wife shortly after her death, ‘as delicate and lovely as anything in the English language’, making a parallel with Hardy. There’s something about its delicate interleaving of the natural, the human and the otherworldly that reminds me of Esenin (peasants, nature, narod, God: Thomas could be a Russian poet):

We met
under a shower
of bird notes.
Fifty years passsed.
Love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
‘Come’ said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

(The Sunday Times printed this poem in 1995, on his nomination for the Nobel Prize; he requested the £100 fee be paid to his soon-to-be second wife, as ‘compensation’.)