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As part of my ongoing collage I've currently sampling from poets including Dylan Thomas, whom I last read fifteen years ago as a teenager. I'm finding this re-reading immensely pleasurable. I'm wondering if this is partly because for my purposes (looking for certain letter-combinations to fit the collage) I have to skim. It's not rhythmic vitality, which I think one can get skimming normally, not even necessarily sonority, but a kind of charisma and risk, that is not risk of formalism nor charisma of being flattered as by a skilled performer/charlatan - which sometimes is what Thomas is reduced to by his critics. Much as I dislike a lot of Movement work, though I do like Charles Tomlinson, I really like Donald Davie, and one of his bones to pick with Thomas was, a key Davie issue, wrong-naming. That is to say, using diction lazily. But I'm not sure that the Thomas I'm enjoying is at all to do with meaning; something more like a composer's setting of words where the realization of the words' meaning isn't happening but one's glad of the travesty because the music's good. Perhaps it's a Clark Coolidge I'm finding in Thomas - not put there as an abstractist gesture as in Coolidge, but just coming out in practice. I just wonder (aloud - to Peter, for example) where Thomas fits in the reclaiming of the forties' poets from Movement demonisation. I know Nicholas Moore thus reclaimed, Gascoyne too, but Thomas? Larger issue perhaps of those big guns like Plath or cummings being on most people's lips when you talk with them about difficult 20th century poetry so one tends to growl reflexly. With cummings I know why I growl, it just feels so flip, but with Thomas? Not as meaning, or naming, or profound phrasemaker but musical poet? What's anyone say to that? Ira %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%