account of many poets' response to Dylan Thomas. In a way, mine too. Only
(excusing my French), of adolescence. "Everyone's mum", in John's message,
it's a poem of extraordinary, fluid beauty. I can see how for John there
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
we've had.
Larkin is one expressing delight and admiration. The tedious assumption,
disapproves of Thomas.
-----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
