In this centenary year of Dylan Thomas (and the 60th anniversary of Under Milk Wood), I offer these thoughts on the greatest Welsh poet of the 20th century, originally from my doctoral research.
Dylan Thomas in the Forties and His Critics
Dylan Thomas in the Forties and His Critics
Dylan Thomas has been defined as the quintessential Forties poet,
though his work had already been widely published and celebrated in the Thirties.
Associated, sometimes ambiguously, with the aims and manifestoes of several key
movements of modernism, such as English surrealism, then the Apocalypse, or New
Romanticism, his oeuvre has ultimately transcended, even as it remains somewhat
hobbled by, those groupings and entanglements. Thomas is virtually unique among
major British twentieth-century poets for remaining controversial more than
fifty years after his death. The controversy circles around whether in fact he
is a major poet. For example he is not included in The Cambridge Companion to English Poets whose six twentieth
century poets are Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Auden and Larkin. Thomas,
representative of the Forties Style, is skipped over, as if the narrative arc
was simply Auden-Larkin.[1]
Perhaps the best comparison would be with his friend,
the poet Edith Sitwell, who never regained critical respect after being
labelled as a self-promoting charlatan as Chris Baldick claims in his The
Modern Movement.[2] The
difference with the Thomas legacy is that, unlike Sitwell’s reputation, which
is now nearly unsalvageable,[3] his
poetry is still intriguingly ambiguous – and this ambiguity lends to the age he
represents its own flickering glamour and intrigue. That poetic language
remains the main point of contention is both puzzling and also reassuring – for
how else should poets be evaluated, than by how they deploy their language and
style?
The broader critical case against Thomas has tended to
be a moral or psychological one bolstered by a circumstantial mix of the banal
and melodramatic, that often skirts the literary qualities of the poetry
altogether. This could be described as the Leavisite tendency to ‘slip from the
text to the man’. The Thomas rap sheet could read as follows: he was Welsh,
started writing young, was not educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, read
poems aloud in a sonorous voice, drank a lot, borrowed money, was a womaniser,
became famous in America, and died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in a
hotel in New York City.[4]
After his death, it was not Thomas himself, but his
spectre, the idea of Thomas, his reputation, which became a whipping boy, for a
whole spectrum of writers who tended to do him down, loudly and often, in print
and in public. Thomas comes to represent, I think, an idea of rhetoric
personified – but worse than that, a Celtic rhetoric – which seemed to combine
the verbal disorder and disease of romanticism with the worst excesses of
sophistry – an oral running sore oozing bad poetry. Thomas, being ornamental,
religious and emotive, was also, and apparently fraudulently, a sober craftsman
– so that, what in other poets was admired, was in him seen as representing
hucksterism.
Curiously, there is very little of Dylan Thomas on film
(though he appeared on television in 1953). This does seem odd, as he was one
of the first post-war poetry celebrities: even as radio was being surpassed by
cinema and TV in America, and voice becoming less important than image. It is
hard to imagine another opportunity for a poet to achieve such celebrity mainly
on the back of sound recordings and public appearances at colleges and town
halls.
Thomas seems to have had his poetry tainted by its
successful contemporary reception, and provokes an anxiety of jealousy – as
well as displeasure occasioned by poets who genuinely abhor the performance
aspects of poetry (as Auden did). However, the work of Dylan Thomas also
exemplifies the final stages of modernist lyricism – a stage where complex
diction was mixed with religious and personal sentiment, and also impersonal
statement.
Dylan Thomas had many critics who tried to wreck his
posthumous reputation, but few as dedicated as Geoffrey Grigson, a
self-described ‘Non-Dylanist’. Grigson, founder of New Verse, and a one-time acolyte of Auden, was liable to lash out, as late
as 1982. In his volume of occasional essays and reviews, Blessings,
Kicks and Curses: A Critical Collection, he both kicks
and curses Dylan Thomas in a brief essay, ‘American and Welsh Dylanism: A Last
Word from a Non-Dylanist’. He comments on how academics fond of Poe and
Baudelaire have now discovered Thomas: ‘This time the bourgeois have turned
round, and lighted a flame of sanctity from the dead poet’s alcoholic breath.’ Grigson
refers to the fact that Thomas drank heavily. He asks, a little rhetorically, ‘Who
cares if this poet sozzled, or made a public dive at parties for the more
appetizingly outlined, if still virginal breasts?’[5]
It is hard not to become polemical in the process of
discussing such writing, but, it must be observed, as dryly as possible, that
very much of the criticism against Thomas is polemical. Grigson offers a more
literary opposition, which I shall quote in a moment, but I do want to observe,
first, how intensely nationalistic anti-Thomas feelings can run, how much
issues of Welshness and class seem to matter to some critics – to them, Thomas
is no English gentleman:
Mr. John Ackerman, in his book on Dylan Thomas, the newest,
doesn’t tell where he (Mr. Ackerman) is to be located: he signs his preface
‘Wales, 1963’, which is running up the Red Dragon on the doorstep. He says ‘a
knowledge of the country and the culture which produced Dylan Thomas is
fundamental to a full understanding of the poet.’ He doesn’t bother ostensibly
about Dylan Thomas’s public legend (good); but having run up the flag, and sung
‘Men of Harlech’, he ties poet and poems to a Swansea childhood (new details
about the school magazine), to the influence of Anglo-Welsh writers (including
Margiad Evans) ‘who helped to create a national consciousness, the sense of a
life being lived that was peculiar to Wales’, and (as if hoping to satisfy all
Welsh parties) to ‘the tradition of culture existing in and through the Welsh
language.’ [….] Mr. Ackerman (it doesn’t sound such a very Welsh name,
Ackerman?) has to say that Dylan ‘is an ancient Welsh name found in the Mabinogion.’[6]
Now, there are a number of things that can be said about this
passage, including the observation that it seems hostile to any attempt to
contextualise, culturally or historically, poetic texts, but there is a
different sort of odour that emanates from the uncomfortable ‘it doesn’t sound
such a very Welsh name, Ackerman?’ whose diction and syntax has a creepy
affinity with Larkin’s ‘Jake Belowksi’ figure in his satire on American
academics. For Grigson, Ackerman, with that foreign-sounding name, becomes a
hypocritical ‘Other’, eager to play the Welsh card, but from somewhere else
really, where people have names like that.
Grigson states the more academic poetic case against
Dylan Thomas clearly when he notes ‘the stale sentimentalism of language’; ‘the
literary stuffing, the echo of Keats, Francis Thompson, the Bible, Joyce,
Hopkins, Owen, even Eliot’; ‘The properties – the worms, the mandrakes, the
shrouds, the druids, the arks, the soul’; ‘The soft words canned (with
canning’s horrible power to soften still more), and then scrambled, with a show
of being original, into premoulded rhythms – the words (so unlike the
vocabulary of Hopkins, whose idiosyncrasy Dylan Thomas so often borrowed and
pulped) never tested against reference and usage, against the living body of
English, and against the totality and resistance of things’.[7]
Grigson has here dropped his sarcasm, and put into clear
terms his problems with the style of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. In many
instances, such criticism can easily be turned on itself, with a simple
inversion. What is wrong with sentimentality (or sentiment)? Or, what is so
rare about poetry full of allusion – especially to the Bible? Eliot is a master
of such allusion. I am not sure what ‘premoulded rhythms are’ if not another
way of saying a crafted use of metre, rhyme and form; and as for using words
like ‘soul’ and ‘shroud’ – other than their slightly ecclesiastical trappings –
surely they are available to poets? I think, ultimately, Grigson’s anti-Thomas
case rests on that of empiricism, Locke’s arguments for plain speech and
Pound’s for prose-hard diction: Dylan Thomas’s language is non-verifiable,
having failed to test itself against ‘things’ – and the ‘living body’ (which
has a religious subtext of its own) of English. This leaves us where we began.
There is something tautological about the critical claim
that ‘all rhetorical poetry is bad because good poetry isn’t rhetorical’, and I
am not sure the sort of case that Grigson builds extends very far past such a
rudimentary sort of evaluative process of circular logic, or taste.
Dylan Thomas was not a marginal figure or pariah, at the
time of his death. There is a brief letter, in London Magazine’s reincarnated 1954 issue, which opens, ‘Sir, the death of Dylan
Thomas at the age of thirty-nine is an immeasurable loss to English letters. In
memory of his poetic genius a fund has been started for the Establishment of a
Trust to assist his widow in the support and education of his three young
children.’[8] It is signed by thirteen hands, including T.S. Eliot, Peggy Ashcroft,
Kenneth Clark, Graham Greene, Augustus John, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, Edith
Sitwell, and his close friend Vernon Watkins. Add to that William Empson’s
tireless support of Thomas, and this begins to sound like something of an
establishment view.
And yet action was already underway, in Scrutiny, well before 1954, to undermine this ‘genius’. It only grew, after
his death. As G.S. Fraser puts it, ‘[…] Dylan Thomas’s reputation as a poet has
undoubtedly suffered at least a mild slump. He was always far too directly and
massively an emotional poet, and in the detail of his language often too
confusing and sometimes apparently confused a poet …’ for the newly-dominant
critics of the Scrutiny school.[9]
A more serious case against Thomas is made in Neil
Corcoran’s significant study, English
Poetry Since 1940, as we shall see in a moment. Chapter
4, ‘A New Romanticism: Apocalypse, Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham, George Barker’,[10] lays out the major problems with much of the Forties Style, as if
published in Scrutiny, in 1952, and not, instead, more than forty years later, in 1993. It
is surprising to read such dismissal of certain elements of diction, syntax
(and subject), in a collection that otherwise covers a wide range of
postmodernist or avant-garde tendencies (J.H. Prynne, for instance). Forties
poetry does seem to upset the critical apple cart.
Corcoran, writing forty years after the London Magazine letter, begins by arguing that Dylan Thomas had his origins in an
interest in surrealism (among other things) but, mainly, himself.[11] The problem is one of narcissism. ‘His is a poetry much taken up
with the fact of, and with the emotions attached to, certain forms of
psychological regression.’[12] This is a position originally advanced by David Holbrook in Llareggubb Revisited, which claims there
is a ‘persistent immaturity’ in the work and language of Thomas.[13]
This narcissism is not considered a good thing for the
poetry. ‘There are too many poems from the 1940s in which the nebulously vatic
seems repellent in its myopic self-assurance or triumphalism.’[14] The poems are trouble, and cause trouble. ‘The trouble with
numerous poems is that their glamour and charm cannot disguise the fact that
they are elaborate tautologies.’[15]
Apparently, the surface pleasures of a Dylan Thomas poem
hide a troubling fact: poems are meant to be logical statements that must not
contradict themselves (or else they become tautological). For Corcoran, a poem
must be rigorously worked through, an equation that yields clear, new results.
‘The effect (of a Thomas poem) can seem like being insistently told, in some
baffling way, some extremely simple things that we already know perfectly well
[…]’[16] For Corcoran, then, it seems a poem cannot justify itself by being
a sheer verbal pleasure alone – it must be an argument of logical clarity. This
rational-empirical approach might suit a New Critical perspective, where form
and content must work in tandem for a clear goal. But it is not the best sort
of critical approach with which to appreciate the special qualities of Thomas.
For Corcoran, Dylan Thomas is a snake charmer, or
charming snake, his poems wild: ‘with their libidinous dictions of friction and
flow’ – ‘the body of the poem always turning back in on itself’ – and this
self-sustaining interest in body, fluid and experience is deeply troubling to a
critic who wants, ideally, the poet to turn their work ‘outwards to a
recognisable external world of action, event, suffering and relationship’.[17] Linguistic, primitive energy, with its potential slippage, its force,
might render the world ‘unrecognizable’ and therefore draw a veil over the
rational order of things. Thomas is ‘Dionysian’ and therefore threatens a
different order of things, one that wants its apples back in the cart –
actually back on the garden’s tree.
Time and again, criticism and critique that appears
elevated to higher concerns returns to disquietude with diction and syntax,
never quite put into words, or often projected on to bigger thematic debates
and quarrels. Corcoran admits to not approving of the language of Thomas, the ‘ultimately
wearying incantations and runes of the earlier work’[18] – as if he was some kind of witch doctor from a particularly
offensive tribe. Or something someone puritanical cannot enjoy without
vestigial guilt.
But not all Thomas is bad, apparently. His later work
(from 1946 or so onwards) shows a marked improvement. ‘That these later poems
invite the reader to ponder such issues of poetic tact, decorum and
responsibility is a measure of their superior discrimination and scruple.’[19] It is interesting that Corcoran feels the later Thomas poetry is
better. This is not the view of William Empson, who ‘liked the early obscure
ones best’, and felt that the Dylan Thomas ‘style had become a mannerism’ by
the time of ‘Altarwise by Owl-light’.[20] The
point is, it is hardly a foregone conclusion that Thomas was necessarily
developing into a better, more mature style.
Consider how many of these evaluative terms used to
approve and affirm the ‘later Thomas’ (as most criticism does the ‘later Graham’)
patronise aspects of style, in the earlier work, that constitute, in their own
aesthetic systems, not simply immature mannerisms of a weak or diseased or
primitive mind, but a different
kind of writing style. I have italicised this last, because,
strikingly, it often comes about, in these forms of criticism, that the main ‘problem’
(and a different style is always problematised, as if it were an invading
disease) is that the writing is, as I said earlier, not identifiable with the
dominant position.
Corcoran wants poems that are associated with tact, decorum, responsibility, and scruple. It is a biographical certainty that Dylan Thomas, the man, was not
particularly responsible. This hedonistic free-falling lifestyle seems to have
contributed to his becoming gravely ill in New York – but it is in no way sure
that his poems would have greatly improved had they become increasingly
scrupulous, even well-behaved, cleaned up and presented as a kind of Movement
poetry, finally come into its own, at the end of the Fifties. Curiously, this
moral-aesthetic shift happened, after a fashion, with the career of W.S.
Graham. As Corcoran informs (using another hygiene trope): ‘W.S. Graham’s
earlier work is helplessly parasitic on Thomas.’[21] Critical writing on Graham seems to confirm this idea, positing a
mythic arc for his writing, whereby the ‘early Graham’ is a deeply-flawed Forties
poet, who, by 1955 (that time of transition to more lucid styles), with his
long poem, The
Nightfishing, begins his miraculous journey to
redemption.
Graham’s career can be, conveniently, broken into an
early and later period, and it is the case that his post-Forties poetry, now
widely admired, is significant and delightful. However, too often, the
admirable critical impulse, to celebrate and approve the later poems, comes at
the expense of Forties poetry – indeed, the Forties Style becomes the Other,
that must be somehow chastised, punished and denigrated, in some kind of
primitive rite of passage, in order for the maturity of English poetry to be
established, and a rightful order restored. In this liminal reading, Forties
poetry is the savage child; and we are reminded again of how class and origin
determines, in some criticism, and for some critics, how a poet shall be
received.
Might we hold out hope of a different reading of the Forties,
where it is not necessary to consider the qualities of the early Graham poems
as something taboo, or badly wrong? Corcoran has this to say about the early
Graham’s poetry:
It has the
same incantatory rhythms; the same small field of reiterated, unspecific
imagery of plant, season, sexuality and the ‘Celtic’; and the same melodramatic
and portentous straining towards ‘vision’, towards some illuminative or
revelatory ecstasy. Collisions of apparent accident and spontaneity tenuously
negotiated into coherence by a fraught will to closure, these poems seem as a
result not only derivative but unreadably and earnestly verbose, a prime case
of that fevered neo-Romanticism whose combating gave an initial impetus and
rationale to the 1950s Movement.[22]
Continuing the trope of invasive disease (popular with wartime
propaganda fixated on the enemy and hygiene) that runs throughout Corcoran’s
chapter on the 1940s, Graham’s early writing (and by extension all Forties
poetry of this kind, deriving from the Dylan Thomas style) is figured as a
rampant disease, which has caused a fever – a verbal fever than can only be
combated, and hence cured, by the triumphant arrival of liberating forces, the
Movement.
It is odd to see this urge to purify, to cleanse the
diction, articulated so vehemently in the 1990s. The language is similar to the
introduction in the New
Lines anthology of 1956, edited by Robert Conquest,
which introduced the ‘Movement’ poets – dismissing the younger poets of the
1940s as representing ‘the sort of corruption that has affected the general
attitude to poetry in the last decade’.
Corcoran is not alone in diagnosing the writing of the
period as some kind of gross physical ailment, a bodily disturbance. Michael
Schmidt, in his Reading
Modern Poetry, refers to ‘the 1940s twitch one associates
with Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, and the early W.S. Graham [...]’.[23]
Robin Mayhead, writing a review for Scrutiny of Thomas’s Collected
Poems, 1934–1952, in 1952, is alert to the pagan forces
at work. Thomas has ‘exuberant verbal energies’ that have led to ‘something of
a cult’ – as if he were, instead, a foreign idol, and not a Welsh boy made
good. Finally, he concludes that ‘the attitudes implicit in the widespread
acceptance of Mr. Thomas as a major poet […] may well strike one as potentially
disastrous for the future of English poetry’.[24] Those pestilent attitudes have, over the past sixty years or so,
been mainly eradicated. English poetry was saved.
To see how, one may turn to Andrew
Motion’s study, Philip Larkin, published in 1982. Motion’s introductory chapter[25]
introduces a significant trope that this chapter has been tracking – that of
foreign poetry as disease or illness. Motion first brings it up when quoting
Larkin, who claimed that after his ‘Celtic fever’ (the period when the Irish
poet Yeats influenced his early work of the 1940s) had abated, he was now a
patient ‘sleeping soundly’.[26]
Motion keeps the metaphor running,
as he explores how he sees the relationship between ‘two traditions – native
English and modernist’ that collide in the first sixty years of the twentieth
century in English poetry. Motion writes that Larkin ‘has done more than any
other living poet to solve the crisis that beset British poetry after the
modernists had entered its bloodstream’.[27]
This is an important sentence, not
least because, as can be seen by reading the whole of the chapter, it is based
on an argument for an ‘English line’ of ‘intensely patriotic poets’ who use a ‘moderate
tone of voice’ that exhibits ‘an unmistakably English tone of voice’ and – for
the Movement writers – a ‘traditionally English stance’, to defend ‘the
interrupted English tradition’.[28]
Motion argues that Larkin, able to
withstand and absorb trace amounts of foreign modernist and symbolist elements
(the ‘crisis’) in his poetry, is able to inoculate himself, and by extension,
an entire English bloodstream, from the more destructive aspects of the disease
that had entered it.
Arguably, there is no one clear ‘English
tradition’ – but several – and there has never been a time in ‘English’ poetry
when there have not been influences from abroad – and in all instances these
influences, whether repelled or accepted, have enriched British poetry. Owen
Barfield writes: ‘A certain foreign element, impinging on the native genius,
has, in point of fact, played a fairly prominent part in the history of English
poetry.’[29] One thinks of all the English poets who based
their work on classical sources – not least Shakespeare; of Wyatt using the
Petrarchan sonnet; of Milton, influenced by Italian poets; of Coleridge
studying German romanticism; Symons,[30] deeply influenced by the French tradition, and
contemporary poets influenced by O’Hara and Stevens.[31]
Ian Hamilton, in his essay ‘The Forties’, writes: ‘the now notorious
forties, has been thoroughly written off in most contemporary pigeon-holings. It
has popularly become the decade dominated by the punch-drunk Apocalypse, the
foaming horsemen, and – as John Wain has diagnosed it – by a wartime hysteria
which could only have produced such rubbish.’[32] He then goes on to quote Wain, who found much of the Forties poetry
‘impossibly overblown, exaggerated, strained, rhetorical’.[33]
Hamilton does think there is
some good (mainly wartime) Forties poetry, and that F.T. Prince might be one of
the better poets of the time, although he also thinks he suffers occasionally
from a ‘grandiose-rhetorical impulse’ – especially in ‘Soldiers Bathing’.[34] My thesis differs from Hamilton (at least) by not seeing such
grandiose, rhetorical impulses as being such a bad thing; not that an
arch-minimalist such as Hamilton (whose own poems have themselves become a
stray style) would have been likely to appreciate the grand gesture.
Recent anthologies of the last decade or so (for
example, The
Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945, edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford) pay short shrift to
any post-war Forties poems or poets, neo-Romantic or otherwise, other than
George Barker, Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham (and they have fourteen pages among
them). Lynette Roberts and F.T Prince are not included – omission or
inoculation?
The
Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 has an introduction subtitled ‘The Democratic Voice’. Choosing to
elide the complex interrelations between the end of World War II and the Cold
War realities that emerged almost immediately, the editors state that ‘World
War II marks a fissure in history and poetry in Britain as well as Ireland.’[35] They neglect Tony Judt’s argument that 1945 is not as clean a break
as has been claimed.[36] In a paragraph, the Forties is mainly highlighted as being where
Auden became American, Eliot became truly English (with ‘the highwater mark of
modernist poetry in Britain’ Four
Quartets) and English poetry found its own (Northern
and regional) champion in Basil Bunting.
The period, lost in a fissure, is then caricatured,
rather easily: ‘The short-lived, strained and clotted New Apocalyptic movement
of the 1940s was sloughed off like a skin. The democratic voice was arriving.’[37] Once again, the skin rash that was the less austere variant of
poetry, as experienced in the Forties (albeit the Apocalyptic variety), is
diagnosed rapidly, and then scrubbed away. The snake has shed its skin.
Now there is a new problem with it though – somehow, it
was not ‘democratic’ – a new voice was arriving (one ushered in by the Butler
Education Act of 1944). This confuses facts on the ground, but paves the way
for the arrival of post-colonial, Irish, Northern and other working class
figures, born between 1939 and 1963 or so, who bring to the poetry table their ‘voices’
that speak a language people want to hear. It is perhaps an inconvenient truth
that Dylan Thomas, George Barker, and other Forties poets were hardly
university-educated toffs themselves, and in many instances were widely popular
and democratic in their writing. Some of the ‘clotted’ cream rises?
Graham rises, in estimation, in Sean O’Brien’s
anthology, The
Fire Box: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945. Graham is described as a ‘major’ poet, in the introduction, and is
included though Dylan Thomas is not.[38] Nor are Roberts or Prince, again. It is unclear why Thomas, who had
very good work published in 1946, and who died in the Fifties, is excluded; his
name is not mentioned, either, in the introduction, though we are told that ‘the
Movement also saw itself in reaction against the poetic excesses of the 1940s,
exemplified by the hysterical irrationalism of the New Apocalypse School’.[39] Exemplified also by the New Romantic movement, which included
Kathleen Raine, Graham, Thomas, Barker and other poets not quite ‘hysterical’.
O’Brien writes of ‘the Second World War, when large
political gestures and the exploitation of emotive language had been put in the
service of barbarism’.[40] Maybe so, though the speeches of Churchill might be considered an
example of wartime oratory at its finest, and the actions of the soldiers so
inspired were not uniformly barbaric. This suspicion of high rhetoric operates
from the time of Davie, through Alvarez, to the present. A purifying fire is
called upon to bring its own austere comforts. The madness is over, the enemy
(foreign, surrealist, strange) has been defeated, the invasion repelled. The
twitch is cured.
It seems to me that there is another way to read the
work of Dylan Thomas – one that allows its great verbal pleasures and music to
continue to be of relevance. In Empson’s reading of Dylan Thomas, the main
aspect of a Thomas poem is not the ‘meaning’ per se (his poems are difficult
for some critics to parse precisely because they do not have meanings in the
usual sense), though they have ‘magnificent meanings’[41] but in ‘the
extreme beauty of sound’. The general argument of all Dylan Thomas poems, for
Empson, which can be applied as a template to reading and enjoying them all, is
‘the idea any man can become Christ, who is a universal’,[42] since ‘events
in Dylan Thomas’s body are related pantheistically to more massive ones outside’.[43]
According to Empson, the Dylan Thomas style was not
monolithic, but developed over time in its influences, from Donne to
Shakespeare, [44]
and he was ‘coming to write more directly and intelligibly – not, I think,
better […].’[45]
Empson observed that the style he had made his own was ‘not part of T.S.
Eliot’s “tradition’’’, which is intriguing.[46] I
should like to reiterate my point that clear-cut histories of poetic lineage in
the Thirties, Forties and Fifties are very complicated; not least because the
usual claim that the Movement is based on Empson’s poetics seems to entirely
avoid his long-running support of Dylan Thomas.
For Thomas, the poem is performative of a style itself –
in this case, a style that emphasises the continuity between rhetoric, verbal
complexity, paradox, the surreal, religious and emotive statement and the
poet’s own body. Empson’s position suggests that a Dylan Thomas poem is a
deliberate microcosm. I might say the poems are homunculi. Much like the
diagrams from Hobbes, where state and body are elided, the passions and pains
of his unique but not original sins and experiences perform themselves out into
the poetic texts.
Given that Thomas was a canny, hard-working craftsman
and editor, fully aware of the modernist debates in poetry, and by no means a
religious zealot, this pantheistic link, fully formed, between poem and body,
between self and text, cannot be simply a visionary leap; rather, it suggests
that his verbally rich poems were modernist objects, ironic artifacts.
Operating within his works is what I call ‘emotional irony’ – which, as we
shall see in the chapter on Prince, is the fusion of neo-Romantic and modernist
modes of style. The poem/poet is both sincere and artificial.
Within the last decade, books by or edited by Chris
Wigginton and John Goodby, and articles by them as well as Edward Larrissy,
have begun to emphasise the complexity of Thomas’s poetic achievement, as a
modernist and figure of contemporary relevance – no longer a mere bogeyman or
whipping boy. Larissy explicitly links the poetry of Empson and Thomas, as in
both cases their styles abound in artifice and rhetoricity. Empson’s poetry ‘offers
an appropriate and absorbing intensity of artifice’,[47] what he
reminds us W.S. Graham called ‘the rich clutter of language’ in the poems of
Dylan Thomas.[48]
Thomas has begun to be appreciated by a younger
generation of critics, who recognise the continuities in his work with the
avant-garde, and language-centered theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. Such
critics celebrate the ‘monstrousness’ of Thomas, the ‘clowning’ and ‘excess’ of
his linguistic performances, his sense of ‘display’, and, finally, the poetics
that underscores all his work – that is, Dylan Thomas is not an orally fixated
country bumpkin, but a Modernist no less than Joyce was, implicated in the full
deployment of language to generate complex linguistic artefacts; but also, in
the ironic slippage of his effects and style, one where everything was thrown
in. As such, we reach a curious paradox: Dylan Thomas is potentially as much
the source of the language poetics of Charles Bernstein, say, as Veronica
Forrest-Thomson is. The Dylan Thomas period, then, remains a source of lively
poetic invention, not a verbal dead end after an unrepeatable tour de force.
copyright Todd Swift, 2014.
[1] Rawson.
[2] Chris Baldick, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement, The Oxford
English Literary History, 13 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.
101.
[3] As Richard Greene tries to do in his new book, Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet,
English Genius (London:
Virago, 2011).
[4] As numerous biographies have shown.
[5] Geoffrey Grigson, Blessings,
Kicks and Curses: A Critical Collection (London:
Allison & Busby, 1982), p. 13.
[6] Grigson, p. 14.
[7]
Grigson, p. 116.
[8] London Magazine, February 1954, Correspondence, p. 79.
[9]
G.S. Fraser, Vision
and Rhetoric: Studies in Modern Poetry (London: Faber
& Faber, 1959), p. 238.
[11]
Corcoran, pp. 39–42.
[12]
Corcoran, p. 43.
[13]
David Holbrook, Llareggub Revisted: Dylan Thomas and the State
of Modern Poetry (London:
Bowes & Bowes, 1962), p. 185.
[14]
Corcoran, p. 42.
[15]
Corcoran, p. 44.
[16]
Corcoran, pp. 44–45.
[17]
Corcoran, pp. 44–45.
[18]
Corcoran, p. 47.
[19]
Corcoran, p. 47.
[20] William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture,
ed. by John Haffenden (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. 391–92.
[21] Corcoran, p. 47.
[22]
Corcoran, p. 47.
[23]
Michael Schmidt, Reading
Modern Poetry (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 69.
[24] Robin Mayhead,
‘Dylan Thomas’, A Selection from Scrutiny, ed. by F.R.
Leavis, 2 vols, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 125–30.
[25] Andrew Motion, Philip
Larkin, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 11–21.
[26] As
the critic Ronan McDonald recently reminded me, in conversation, this idea of
the tensions between the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon derive much of their force
from Matthew Arnold’s writing on the subject.
[27] Motion, p. 20.
[28]
Motion, p. 20.
[29]
Owen Barfield, Poetic
Diction: A Study in Meaning, 2nd edn (Middleton, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005), p. 172.
[30] The
key thing to think of here is the critical reception of F.T. Prince. If the development of British poetry
1900–1960 is seen as a line interrupted, circa 1910, and then recommenced,
circa 1950, what is posited is an interregnum period of roughly forty years,
crowned by the Forties, which is increasingly ‘infected’ with influences and
styles that do not properly represent the ‘English voice’. A poet like Prince is interested in foreign
styles and models, particularly the Italian, French and American, and writes in
a ‘tone’ that is not, really, moderate.
Therefore, for poet-critics eager to see the English line reinstalled,
and the foreign fever with its high styles downgraded, Prince becomes a part of
the problem.
[31] It is one of the odder aspects of the
rear-guard action against British modernism that modern poetry’s chief fault is
taken to be its un-Englishness.
[32] Ian
Hamilton, A
Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews (London: Faber &
Faber, 1973), p. 55.
[33] Hamilton, p. 55.
[34] Hamilton, p. 72.
[35] The Penguin
Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945, ed.
by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford (London: Viking, 1998), pp. xix–xxxii.
[36]
Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton, ‘Introduction’, in A Concise
Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (see Milne above), pp. 1–10
(p. 3).
[37]
Armitage and Crawford, p. xx.
[38]
Sean O’Brien, The
Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945
(London: Picador, 1998), pp. xxv–xxxviii.
[39]
O’Brien, p. xxx.
[40]
O’Brien, p. xxx.
[41] Empson, p. 405.
[42] Empson, p. 397.
[43] Empson, p. 385.
[44] Empson, p. 388.
[45] Empson, p. 410.
[46] Empson, p. 405.
[47] Edward Larrissy,
‘Languages of Modernism’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (see Olsen, above), pp. 131–44 (p. 137).
[48] Larrissy, p. 140.
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