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
Chapter 4 - ‘My jack of Christ’: hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism
- 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
Do you know the experience of sitting in a corner of a darkened room, a little light coming in through the window, and staring, fixedly and unmovedly, at the face of another in an opposite corner, never taking the eyes off the lines of the other's face? Slowly the face changes, the jaw droops, the brow slips into the cheeks, and the face is one strange white circle, utter darkness around it. Then new features form on the face, a goat's mouth slides across the circle, eyes shine in the pits of the cheeks. Then there is nothing but the circle again, and from the darkness around it rises, perhaps, the antlers of a deer, or a cloven foot, or the fingers of a hand, or a thing no words can ever describe, a shape, not beautiful or horrible, but as deep as hell and as quiet as heaven. … It's all optical illusion, I suppose, but I always call it the invoking of devils.
– Dylan Thomas, letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 December 1933.Monsters and borders
Like much poetry of the 1930s, Dylan Thomas's traced the contours of the zeitgeist in its concern with borders and the menace that they portended in a Europe fragmented into new nation-states and jittery with rumours of impending war. Thomas, however, had a head start, in this respect, on the English New Country poets, for, as Tony Conran notes, ‘Anglo-Welsh is a description of a frontier as much as a culture’, and Anglo-Welsh poets were adept at ‘mov[ing] across this shadowy no-man's land in both directions’. In Thomas's case, his English contemporaries’ interest in being ‘on the frontier’ was written across a concern with border-zones and boundary-crossings, which derived from a far deeper, centuries-old condition. As I've argued in previous chapters, boundaries in Thomas's work were inscribed at the level of the body and in language, too, where they were treated as constitutive of the self in ways beyond the reach of programmes of rational analysis or therapy.
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- The Poetry of Dylan ThomasUnder the Spelling Wall, pp. 238 - 301Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013