E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The BBC - perhaps feeling guilty over its infamous internal memos of the 40s and 50s outlining how Dylan Thomas was never to be described as the pre-eminent poet of his age (that was Eliot or Auden according to the Beeb)has -for the centenary of the Welsh poetic genius - produced a classy 80 minute TV show, written by Andrew Davies , king of the literary TV adaptation, and starring Tom Hollander , one of the best actors of his generation - that sucks the life out of the legend, and comes across as an episode of Mad Men . Part of my PhD was on Thomas - I admire his work a great deal, but think him to have been a little shit, who manipulated friends and family, and lied and schemed to get money and free drinks and attention.  These are hardly unusual actions when it comes to alcoholics, let alone self-obsessed geniuses.  Thomas is often accused by critics of his work of being a narcissist, which is sort of like calling Poe morbid, or David Lynch weird.  Yes, sure, but...

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 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 centur...