It is a great mistake to divide Thompson’s career into Catholic and non-Catholic periods. Roman Catholicism haunts all of his writing, even the novel and travelogue. The early poetry is as deeply and explicitly theological as the later work. What differs mostly is the speaker’s perceived relationship toward grace and redemption. Edward Field’s formula is exactly backward: only in Thompson’s early work does the persona of the guilt-ridden sinner appear. This torturously divided soul, vacillating between carnal desire and spiritual despair, serves as the protagonist of the early work. If the young Thompson was indeed a “brilliant bad boy,” he was also the very poster child of Catholic guilt. For him, sexual inebriation inevitably led to a theological hangover. By contrast, the calm and grateful persona of the later work is unconcerned with guilt or repentance.
See also: Here at Last is Love: The Poems of Dunstan Thompson.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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