There was something deeply shocking about the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins. He was neither a roaring drunk like his close friend Dylan Thomas, nor was he a philanderer. Though a bard to his fingertips and much given to the sort of full-throated declamation which made even admirers like Philip Larkin wince with discomfort when he took to the podium, Watkins was otherwise virtually inconspicuous. He was not so much averse to the limelight as indifferent to it. The scandal lay elsewhere. Simply put, he was a superb poet who was also a happy man.

This isn’t only eccentric; it’s downright distasteful. “Agony is one of my changes of garment,” Whitman yawped, and we expect — no, we demand — that our poets parade a full wardrobe of torments. Watkins preferred gray flannels. Sometimes, as if to explain away the anomaly between Watkins’s high art and the monotonous contentment of his life, his admirers invoke the famous lines of Yeats (whom Watkins revered): “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.” In this scenario, Watkins was a sort of poetic anchorite, sacrificing worldly concerns to achieve the remarkable perfection of his craft. Frankly, this is nonsense. It’s true that he worked for almost 40 years as a lowly clerk in Lloyd’s Bank in Swansea and resolutely turned down all offers of promotion for fear a better position would interfere with his writing. But he had a long and loving marriage, a lively brood of kids, took a keen delight in sports — he died in 1967 after playing a tennis match — and was nourished by the sea that broke on the Gower Peninsula near his house. His devotion to poetry was absolute, but it was sustained and made possible by the richness of his life.

This year marks the centenary of his birth, on June 27, 1906. Never a popular poet, Watkins’s remarkable work has somehow fallen into even deeper obscurity since his death. This is puzzling, for his influence, though unacknowledged, is pervasive. Now with “New Selected Poems” (Carcanet Press, 144 pages, $17.95), edited by Richard Ramsbotham, a new generation of readers may discover him. They will be startled, if not shocked, by what they find; or maybe rather, by what they don’t find.

For one thing, Watkins’s distinctive accents, though unmistakable, seem weirdly impersonal. His voice is stripped of all idiosyncrasy.There are no confessions but plenty of disclosures; and yet, even these have an elemental ring, as though the poet had somehow eclipsed the merely individual so that the big forces of nature might voice themselves through him, the sea first of all but the wind and the rocks and the stars as well. A devoted beachcomber, Watkins loved whatever the ocean disgorged; he had a particular fondness for seashells. Here is the opening stanza of “The Shell:”

Who could devise
But the dark sea this thing
Of depth, of dyes
Claws of weed cling,
Whose colour cries:
‘I am of water, as of air the wing,’
Yet holds the eyes
As though they looked on music perishing?

The shell is the ideal emblem of Watkins’s poetry. Emptied of its tenant, worked by the action of the tides, it has become perfected form, a pure instrument, music made visible. There’s a ghostly and Platonic cast to this side of Watkins’s verse, and for all its artistry, it takes getting used to. The point is not the shell but the music it makes possible. (In this, Watkins, a brilliant translator of German poetry, comes close to his beloved Rilke, who wrote, “I love to hear the singing of things.”)

I don’t want to create the false impression that Watkins was a chilly contemplator of eternal symbols. His poems, in every known form — from free verse to sonnets to ballads and long swooping elegies — are as passionate as they are poised. His greatest single poem, the spooky and hypnotic “Ballad of the Mari Lwyd,” shows the full power of his gift. The phrase is Welsh — pronounced “marry loo-id” — and means “gray mare.” An old Welsh custom, still alive when Watkins was a child, sent ragtag revelers out on the last night of the year with the bleached skull of a horse to knock on doors and trade rhyming banter with the inhabitants in exchange for treats. Like the hollow shell, the skull is a magical instrument but one on which the dead can play:

Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.
Now dead men rise in the frost of the stars
And fists on the coffins knock.
They dropped in their graves without one sound;
Then they were steady and stiff.
But now they tear through the frost on the ground
As heretic, drunkard and thief.

I’ve heard this long ballad recited, and it made the hairs on my neck stand up. Here the impersonal timbre Watkins toiled so stubbornly to fashion achieves terrifying force; the living move through its refrains like mere shadows of the dead, driven by the hooves of nightmare, for the dead and the living “beat with the selfsame heart.”

Though admired by T.S. Eliot (who published him), Marianne Moore, Thomas, Larkin, and others, Watkins never garnered much acclaim. But it would be mistaken to relegate him to that dismal, and overpopulated, category, the “neglected poet.” Watkins accepted the few late honors that came his way with great good humor, yet they had nothing to do with what mattered. At the time of his fatal heart attack he was about to be offered the Poet Laureateship; in fact, the dutiful bank clerk and affable paterfamilias was too ambitious for such paltry laurels. Like Keats, whose only wish was to be counted “with the English poets,” Watkins wanted nothing less than “Immortality.” That’s a long gamble; in a celebrity culture, it seems both quaint and faintly monstrous. Maybe the very magnitude of the ambition fed the wonderful poems even as it gave the life its eccentric measure of perfection.

eormsby@nysun.com