Hi Mark, in reply to your earlier request I'm afraid I can only approach it with some autobiography. (I've just seen that for Peter too the association with Hopkins surfaces.)
I first read Dylan Thomas, along with Hopkins, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, and immediately fell under the spell of their music. Though I wouldn't have used these terms then, what I think I was responding to in Thomas, along with his multitude of readers, was a sense of the primacy of intricately patterned sound, the lovely promiscuities of language, the combination of unruly play and deadly seriousness, the proximity of the physical and the metaphysical that shaped a poetry of simultaneous celebration and elegy.
I reread his poems some four or five years later in the mid-seventies with slightly less enthusiasm, perhaps because I'd become immersed in Hart Crane who had many of the same qualities a fortiori, but still I retained a feeling of deep indebtedness to Thomas. I imagine some of my first attempts to write were very much in Dylan Thomas mode, though there's usually a plethora and chaos of models at work in young writers. Between the two readings of him, I had become aware of the pervasive academic disapproval of Thomas, but wasn't much swayed by that because subsequent British poetry that was given a higher critical profile held, with few exceptions, very little appeal for me.
I went to live abroad in my late twenties and when I returned some years later everything I owned, which was mainly books, had been stolen from a lock-up garage. I gradually replaced all the collected poems - Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Crane, Frost, Bishop etc. But for some reason I didn't replace the Collected Thomas. Not until a couple of years ago when I reread him. So that's near on thirty years of not giving him much attention. Whatever else this implies, I think it has to indicate my interests and tastes had moved away.
I can only figure that it has something to do, very crudely speaking, with a distinction between the 'cantato' and the 'parlato', with Thomas near one end of the spectrum, which is where I began as a writer, though I became increasingly interested in the music of speech. All the same I still can't read a Thomas poem like 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower' - and maybe a score or so of his others - without pleasure and astonishment.
Jamie
> On 28 Jul 2016, at 18:46, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> That's rather more british poetry politics than the facebook threaders will be aware of. How did Thomas feature in your own formation, Jamie?
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Jul 28, 2016 1:30 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: a bit ofresearch
>>
>> Mark's "a phase of their poetic adolescence" doesn't surprise me as an
>> account of many poets' response to Dylan Thomas. In a way, mine too. Only
>> that should acknowledge the great importance, the condicio sine qua non
>> (excusing my French), of adolescence. "Everyone's mum", in John's message,
>> seems to me to show excellent taste in having Fern Hill as her favourite -
>> it's a poem of extraordinary, fluid beauty. I can see how for John there
>> might be a need to rescue Thomas from many decades of academic oblivion by
>> emphasising his modernist, his "microcosmic and biomorphic coordinates", but
>> he needs little rescuing on behalf of the public who have continued to
>> revere him. I was given a lift a few months back by someone who rarely reads
>> any poetry and top of the pile of CDs was Dylan Thomas reading his poems. In
>> my experience this is quite typical - Thomas is the last truly popular poet
>> we've had.
>> The Movement's reaction against the perceived emotionalism of his work
>> has been documented, but the only reference I've found from admittedly early
>> Larkin is one expressing delight and admiration. The tedious assumption,
>> much repeated on this list, that the Movement's aesthetics flow seamlessly
>> into what's called the contemporary 'mainstream' (including Northern Irish
>> poetry) leads to another fallacious assumption that this grouping
>> disapproves of Thomas.
>> Jamie
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: GOODBY JOHN
>> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 4:11 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: a bit ofresearch
>>
>> I'm probably the wrong person to respond to this - as a poet I'd say I'm not
>> personally particularly affected by Thomas in any obvious way, except in the
>> sense that he was one who was committed to the 'revolution of the word'. But
>> as
>> an academic, the editor of his poems and author of a monograph on his poetry
>> (Under the spelling wall, Liverpool UP, 2013), he's immensely important to
>> me.
>> I'm presently completing a guide to his poetry and notebooks, editing a
>> facsimile of the newly discovered fifth notebook, and about to begin a brief
>> biography. So I'm saturated in him, that way. And all I'd say, with that hat
>> on,
>> is that his work, at its best, is magnificent, darkly witty, rooted in an
>> understanding and playful exploitation of the division between language as
>> medium and message-bearer. Its obsession with 'process' and the body, it's
>> womb-tomb, microcosmic and biomorphic coordinates, are a response to the
>> stalling of high modernism and the onset of the 1930s crisis - strip away
>> the
>> surfaces and this is what you have - and they also flow from Thomas' own
>> liminal, hybrid nature (Anglo-Welsh, on the cusp between Cymrophone and
>> anglophone Wales, between industrial and rural zones, and, even more
>> elementally, land and sea). He fuses (a favourite word) the collage
>> jump-cutting
>> of modernism with the retro metrical forms and return to standard syntax of
>> the
>> Audenesque poets, and straddles the fault-line between 'mainstream' and
>> 'innovative' which has existed in British poetry since ca. 1930. This is one
>> reason - a resurgence of little-Englander sentiment was another - why, after
>> faring pretty well for 2 decades after his death, he was dumped from the
>> histories of the period written after the late 1970s (see Valentine
>> Cunningham,
>> Neil Corcoran, et al). It's difficult to incorporate a poet who wrote both
>> 'Altarwise by owl-light', one of the most fiendishly difficult modernist
>> poems
>> in the language, and 'Fern Hill', everyone's Mum's favourite, into the
>> Hardy-Auden-Larkin-Raine-Armitage (yes, I know I exaggerate, but you know
>> what I
>> mean) narrative, and he's paid the price - high visibility, low
>> understanding. I
>> think he remains a fascinating, crucial figure, a major influence on WS
>> Graham,
>> Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and even on later, experimental figures (check out
>> Ralph Maud's acknowledgement to one JH Prynne in his 1968 edition of the
>> notebooks), and we won't understand 20thC poetry until we understand him
>> more
>> fully. To repeat, or rather recast: Thomas is basically a modernist poet
>> interested in language and what it can do and have done to it, not a
>> late-Romantic confessionalist. Some of what has been done recently has tried
>> to
>> focus on that - on his foregrounding of the materiality of language, his use
>> of
>> multiple negatives to create qualified statement, his indebtedness to
>> contemporary popular science (Whitehead, Eddington, Jeans, Huxley, etc.), so
>> hopefully a more just and balanced appreciation is starting to emerge. But
>> apologies for rambling on, and at the same time barely scratching the
>> surface.
>> I'm on holiday at the moment (back 1 August), but would be happy to rejoin
>> the
>> discussion later - and if anyone wants to discuss any of this b/c, please
>> feel
>> free.
>>
>>>
>>> On 27/07/2016, 16:23, "British & Irish poets on behalf of Mark Weiss"
>>> <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Any extremely unscientific survey.
>>>>
>>>> Dylan Thomas came up on a facebook thread. The respondents were all
>>>> poets. The question: what part did Dylan Thomas play in your development?
>>>> How do you value his poetry now?
>>>>
>>>> There seemed to me a clear division in the responses. Those descended
>>>> from, schooled by, you get my drift, Eliot and Audenwere rhapsodic about
>>>> him, those descended from the New American Poetry less so or not at all.
>>>> I said it was unscientific. Fact is, I can't remember his ever being
>>>> mentioned by the poets I know, except as a phase of their poetic
>>>> adolescence. The same is true of my British non-mainstream poet friends.
>>>> I don't remember his ever coming up on this list, either.
>>>>
>>>> So? How would you answer the question(s)? I'll convey the results, sans
>>>> names, if you please.
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>>
>>>> Mark
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