‘English disputes’ and American readings

‘Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the English disputes about Dylan Thomas's greatness,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1947, before going on to dismiss the ‘inarticulate extravagance of Edith Sitwell and Herbert Read’ and the ‘methodical, controversial blindness of [Arthur] Symons, [Geoffrey] Grigson’ and others. In the decades since Thomas's death, however, the critical response to Thomas's work in the United States has been no less puzzling. Critics and literary historians tend to underestimate Thomas's influence, and his importance to many American poets, despite the fact that several major figures – including John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery – have expressed a sense of affinity with Thomas's work. John Goodby's view that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas's impact on US poetry is remarkable’ is not shared by many US American poetry scholars and commentators. Nick Halpern briefly acknowledges the influence of Thomas and ‘the New Romantics’ on Denise Levertov's early poetry in his essay in The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015), but Edward Brunner, writing in the same volume, is quick to group Thomas among the ‘“Bohemian” poets of rhetorical excess’, whose example was rejected by American poets who started to gain prominence in the 1970s, including Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand. Apart from these brief references, Thomas is not mentioned in Bendixen and Burt's history – not even in discussions of those poets for whom he has been generally acknowledged as a hugely important figure, such as Berryman and others of the so-called Middle Generation.

A similar tendency to undervalue Thomas's importance in US American poetic culture is expressed by Robert von Hallberg in his essay on American poetry between 1945 and 1950 in the eighth volume of Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge History of American Literature (1996). Von Hallberg suggests, on the one hand, that ‘Thomas's career was a stunning spectacle of a poet who openly refused to be minor’: for ‘the generation of Lowell, Berryman, and [Randall] Jarrell […] [h]e was spoken of as another Shakespeare, or as a fake, but not as a minor or academic poet.’ Von Hallberg presents Thomas's public persona as something poets such as Lowell and Berryman sought to imitate, quite apart from any engagement with his approach to language or form.