Dylan Thomas often described his writing process as one of putting-in: poems are ‘“watertight compartments”’; he was ‘tightly packing away everything I have and know into a mad-doctor’s bag’. To be sure, Thomas’s writing has in it a lot of containers, the escape of whose contents constitutes a threat or a promise or an enacted drama: rooms, houses, mouths, towns, tins of peaches, dead dogs, world-views, stomachs, keepings of secrets and guilts. This chapter offers an approach to some of these things, and in doing so reveals another peculiarity: the way in which Thomas’s ‘tightly packed’ writing prompts in his critics an urge to explain, unfold, and unpack his ‘mad-doctor’s bag’, combined with an anxiety and embarrassment about the propriety of seeing and touching what’s in it, which they might even turn out to have illegitimately smuggled in themselves. A poem is a can of worms; opening some of Thomas’s, this chapter explores ways in which criticism could be something more than a worm-tidy. The chapter looks into numerous cans of worms, including ‘The Conversation of Prayers’, ‘Request to Leda (Homage to William Empson)’ – the chapter touches on Empson and pastoral – and a short story called ‘The Peaches’.
Writing Prompts Help Improve Expression of Conceptual Understanding in Chemistry
