On 8/25/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> In general agreement here, except:
>
> 1. whether a poem is "political" epends on the scope one gives the term
sure , but to mis-quote Eagleton, if everything is political then the
term becomes meaningless.
I can make up a situation where this poem maybe a political gesture,
that's not to say it is. You could make a case for the equivocation
between religion and humanism. If that's political, then so be it. I
don't think I'd sign my name to such a thing.
> 2. More important, I think, it seems to me that the poem stands
> outside of time no more nor less than any other phenomenon,
> regardless of the poet's pointing or not to the ephemera around him.
> In Thomas' case his attempt to stay outside of time (I'll take your
> word for it) reads to me as a mannerism that locks it into its time,
> as Morris's neogothic locks him and the preRaphaelites into theirs.
I agree - although I'd point to his lack of metaphors derived from the
20th C. As I said at the beginning of this thread, it's as if he
stepped fresh from the 18th Century. Nothing in the 20th C seems to
perturb his poetic thought at all. Which is a bit strange given the
huge grappling with the 20th C that (mostly) other Europeans were
doing. None of that machine nonsense, speed, travel. Also Thomas is
pretty much of a one-off even at the time of his writing. I can't
think of a single writer like him in the English 20c canon. Prove me
wrong, here, petc.
In an argument in New-Poetry, I expressed my dislike for Robert Frost,
who it is claimed wrote about a doomed community ancients attached to
the soil etc. It strikes me now that Dylan Thomas is a an example of a
member of a doomed community who stood up and shouted. Just a thought.
> I'm not much of a fan of Thomas'. I briefly loved his work, say ages
> 15 to 17, for the fustian of it--it's fun to howl it into the night
> as one tries to destroy one's liver. Its mannered quality has since
> turned me away.
Yeah, pretty much for me as well. The seer mood out-moded itself pretty quickly.
Roger
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