.

  What interests me more are your points a), b) and c) which I'd like to return to when I have more time. I think these do touch on a serious aesthetic divide between different poetic tendencies, and which make Dylan Thomas a crucial place to explore them. I'll try to curb any habit, which Tim has complained about, of levelling these differences and do my best to address the arguments you've put in this decisive form.

Till then,

Jamie

On 1 Aug 2016, at 22:08, GOODBY JOHN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Jamie,

What can I say, but thanks for your generous response to my two emails? I'm glad you, and some others on the list, appreciated them (especially as I usually say very little indeed, and the attack of loggorhoea disconcerted me almost as much as it probably did everyone else).

Your disagreements don't surprise me, no; but as usual, they're intelligently put, and provoke me to think, and that's a good thing. I suppose I'd answer by saying

a) that it's pretty easy to write a better poem than 'Here in this spring', so that doesn't really prove much; but my point about Mahon and Longley and Heaney (whose work I like, remember) is that their attitude to language and poetry is essentially less radical and imaginative than Thomas's, and this limits their achievement. Meaning that 

b) when Thomas framed his 'from words' it wasn't as some generalised nostrum, as you make it seem, but as a very specific contra-New Country, anti-discursive poetic strategy. Of course all poets work both from and towards words, but we also know that some do more of one than of the other, and that there are tipping points where qualitative changes occur in their definitions of what poetry encompasses, and what the scope of its ambition is.

c) Which means also that the different kinds of poetry can 'happily co-exist', but not always, and not in some kind of easy continuum; the difference between them clearly needed to be drawn, and sharply, by Thomas at a certain point in the 1930s in order for him to write a poem like 'The force that through the green fuse'. The alternative - as you see if you look at his notebooks - was to become a kind of dilute, derivative South Walian Eliot-cum-Auden.