In one of the more bizarre asides in ‘The Function of Criticism’, an essay which has come to look increasingly radical the more the notion of a unitary modernism is revised, T. S. Eliot observed that ‘the possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust … It is a voice to which, for convenience, we may give a name: and the name I suggest is Whiggery’. The claim is evidence of Eliot's rightward progression in the 1920s, a coincidental seizing on the birthplace of Dylan Thomas as a location for irredeemable provincialism. For Eliot, having Vetch Field rather than Litde Gidding as a destination is a sure sign of the plebeian ‘inner voice’; Swansea equals Dissent, industry, philistinism and possibly also internal British difference, a would–be insider's put–down to distract from Eliot's self–fashioning as Anglican, classicist and monarchist. Yet the slur cuts both ways, and can equally be said to furnish a starting–point for a consideration of Thomas' poetry and its relationship to modernist precursors like Eliot himself.