Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The critical fates of Dylan Thomas
- Chapter 1 ‘Eggs laid by tigers’: process and the politics of mannerist modernism
- Chapter 2 ‘Under the spelling wall’: language and style
- Chapter 3 ‘Libidinous betrayal’: body-mind, sex and gender
- Chapter 4 ‘My jack of Christ’: hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism
- Chapter 5 ‘Near and fire neighbours’: war, apocalypse and elegy
- Chapter 6 ‘That country kind’: Cold War pastoral, carnival and the late style
- Conclusion: ‘The liquid choirs of his tribes’: Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertext
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: ‘The liquid choirs of his tribes’: Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertext
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The critical fates of Dylan Thomas
- Chapter 1 ‘Eggs laid by tigers’: process and the politics of mannerist modernism
- Chapter 2 ‘Under the spelling wall’: language and style
- Chapter 3 ‘Libidinous betrayal’: body-mind, sex and gender
- Chapter 4 ‘My jack of Christ’: hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism
- Chapter 5 ‘Near and fire neighbours’: war, apocalypse and elegy
- Chapter 6 ‘That country kind’: Cold War pastoral, carnival and the late style
- Conclusion: ‘The liquid choirs of his tribes’: Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertext
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Tristan Tzara: I don't know much about contemporary literature in England.
Could you tell me about it?
Lee Harwood: It's difficult. The only poets that are published aren't poets.
They're just intellectuals who write clever lines. The only poet we've had this century is Dylan Thomas.
Tristan Tzara: Yes, recently I was offered an Italian literary prize and I accepted it for the sole reason that Dylan Thomas had received it once.
– Lee Harwood interview with Tristan Tzara, 1963.By Dylan Thomas Square his statue fidgets, turning from the English chain-house steak bar and the new marina to the sunset, where no wave breaks over his fame.
He sees through me as if I was America, which grew a culture of his death under glass.
– ‘Aeronwy's Story’, Ian Duhig.‘The death of Dylan Thomas’, as Karl Shapiro put it, ‘was the cause of the most singular demonstration of suffering in modern literary history. One searches the memory in vain for any parallel to it’. The mourning was on an appropriately mythic scale, and it crossed social and cultural boundaries; not only were there two Times obituaries, but one by the popular columnist ‘Vicky’ in The Daily Mirror. It was most intense in the US, where guilt and the sense that Thomas symbolised the charisma missing from post-war society intensified the response. But everywhere, he was seen as a rebel against modern, mass society's ‘control, complacency and deliberation’ and as one who, ‘magnificently ill-equipped to deal with the modern world’, in Cyril Connolly's phrase, had become a ‘victim of the organization man’. Indeed, for some, it was lyric poetry itself, or even a certain kind of human possibility, which had been lost. He was seen as ‘the first modern romantic … who offered himself up as a public, not a private, sacrifice’, exemplifying the point made by Jacqueline Rose of Sylvia Plath – that one of the things that the reception of such poets reveals about our ‘general culture’ is the ‘perverse component (voyeurism and sadism) of [its] public acclaim’.
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- Information
- The Poetry of Dylan ThomasUnder the Spelling Wall, pp. 433 - 462Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013