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