Staircases, fires; bombs, milk, wombs, wax, hangmen, sleep, rabbits, stew; a Mars Bar, pinpoints; lovely peaches

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’.

Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.

Trouble at the Explosive Plant: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas

This chapter analyses Thomas’s Second World War poetry within a comparative context; it reads it alongside – and also through – the art of Ceri Richards, another individual who combined a Swansea-lineage, some European aesthetic influences, and a compulsive – if horrified – fascination with beauty-in-destruction. The wartime works of both Richards and Thomas repeatedly return to representations of the organic as a way of capturing moments of intense violence. In doing so, they raise a number of vital questions. If these works aim to capture the incendiary horrors and transformative energy of the moment when all is in flux, how can they do this using the organic? If a violent moment is knowable through a version of the natural world, how then is destruction changed? What other kinds of temporalities are imported into such a ‘timeless second’ – to use William Sansom’s phrase? And, concomitantly, how is the idea of nature and the natural changed if it is being utilised to portray blast and terror? The chapter proceeds through close analysis of a number of Thomas’s wartime poems – including ‘Deaths and Entrances’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ – and sets them alongside art works by Richards such as Blossoms (1940) and Cycle of Nature (1944).

About Time: A Modernist Coda for Thomas

This chapter – a coda to Reading Dylan Thomas – offers a broad view of the ways the volume might help us to situate Dylan Thomas in relation to modernist studies. It ponders the matter of what a ‘critical context’ might be in this case, and attempts to redraw a historical and critical picture of Thomas working at the interface of times, of the temporal imaginaries as well as tempi of nature and technology, of antiquity and modernity.

‘Fine contrary excess’: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Thomas’s Northern Irish Afterlives

Dylan Thomas’s work is indebted in many ways to the two giants of early twentieth-century Irish literature, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as many critics have acknowledged. Yet Thomas’s work has also left legacies of its own within subsequent Irish writing. As Seamus Heaney commented in his 1993 Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture on Thomas, the Welsh poet was a key ‘part of the initiation’ of his postwar ‘11+ generation into literary culture’, not only through his books but also through his broadcasts and recordings. This chapter argues that within modern Irish poetry, and especially Northern Irish poetry, not least against the backdrop of the failures of the Northern Irish political status quo, Thomas’s work has helped to open up an alternate and less restrictive sense of the poet’s place in relation to the public realm. The impact of Thomas’s adolescent notebook mining and poetic responses to war, as well as the whimsy of his prose and radio work, are traced in this chapter, especially in relation to the work of Heaney and Derek Mahon.

‘The verticals of Adam’: Dylan Thomas and Apocalyptic Modernism

The argument of this chapter concerns Thomas’s place within the modernist tradition, and in the strand of Apocalyptic poetics in particular. To review Thomas’s place as such entails a reconsideration of the tradition itself. Having provided a history of the term ‘Apocalyptic’, the chapter turns to Thomas’s particular and formative purchase on Apocalyptic thinking, principally by focussing on his response to two poets who saw the modernist apocalypse coming: Wilfred Owen and D. H. Lawrence. To settle on these poets is to clarify a strand of Apocalyptic prophecy from Shakespeare to Shelley, which reached a peak much later in the aesthetic elaborations of the First World War. The approach, here, to triangulating these influences has to do with settling on Thomas’s first two collections, 18 Poems and Twenty-Five Poems, which bear the most palpable – and hitherto unnoticed – traces of Owen and Lawrence. In offering an insight into Thomas’s place among these budding Apocalyptics, the chapter attends to a number of the lyrics that made Thomas’s name, including ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ and ‘Altarwise by owl-light’.

Dylan Thomas on the BBC Eastern Service

This chapter offers an approach to one of Thomas’s most regular forms of employment in the 1940s: public broadcasting. The BBC had always been an exacting employer, and so it proved to be for Thomas, who often complained that his contract with the Corporation afforded little room for manoeuvre. His work on-air requires special attention, however, both for the things it has to tell us about his development of voice during and after the Second World War, and for what it reveals about the BBC’s imperial politics. For as well as contributing to the Home Service, Thomas spent a good deal of the 1940s writing scripts for the Eastern Service – supposedly educating young Indian listeners, but, more often than not, getting caught up in debates about Independence. With the help of his extant Broadcasts and a series of manuscripts, this chapter assesses Thomas’s work for a poetry series called ‘Book of Verse’ – including his programme about the influence of Wilfred Owen in 1946 – and touches too on his contribution to wartime cinema.

Wave Power: The Effacement of the Caesura in Dylan Thomas’s Poetry

This chapter attends to the supposed indulgence of Thomas’s poetry, and includes a positive valuation of the charge that Thomas’s work is masturbatory. It argues that in his poetry Thomas seeks to efface what Freud termed the caesura of birth, to collapse temporality and thus efface the caesura of death, and in certain late poems to erase the prosodic caesura through use of syllabics. The marked horror of heterosexual intercourse evident from the start in Thomas’s poems is linked to this endeavour to erase poetic thresholds, so generating the ever-changing unchangeability of ‘wave power’, an oceanic state incorporating past, present and future. The horizons of individual experience fold into the poem prosodically at the same time that the caesuras between earth, sea and air appear and are cancelled or confused. The chapter focuses its discussion on a reading of ‘Poem in October’ and draws on both psychoanalytical and theoretical poetic writing on caesura.

Film, Gramophones and the Noise of Landscape in Dylan Thomas and Lynette Roberts

In Part II of Lynette Roberts’s Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), a gramophone washed up on the south Wales seashore may be seen in the light of Roberts’s interest in film in a period which had, according to John Cage, seen a new awareness of ‘sound effects’ and a resulting tension between ‘noise and so-called musical sounds’. Roberts wrote in the preface: ‘when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel’. However, rather than presenting poetry and film as potentially complementary elements, Gods seems to evoke filmic techniques through its juxtapositions and awareness of environmental sound. The seashore gramophone also echoes an image in Dylan Thomas’s 1935 poem ‘I, in my intricate image’, which in its expansive scope and its densely detailed coastal imagery has several similarities with Roberts’s poem. For both poets, landscape is mediated by awareness of film, and by the approach to environmental sound that film enables. Film’s sensory simultaneity provides a model for locating the lyric and narrative energies of the poems within the landscapes they describe as well as the media landscape of the mid-twentieth century.

‘Lamp-posts and high-volted fruits’: Scientific Discourse in the Work of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is generally regarded as a poet purely of the organic and vitalistic. However, his extensive recourse to an imagery of blood and soil, stars and flesh, seems to escape the atavistic and reactionary tenor we might expect, and which is found in contemporaries who share his mythopoeic, biological concerns. Yet it is not immediately clear how it does so. Historical context clearly plays a role – a generational repugnance for Nazi racial ideology – as does allegiance to the Joycean ‘revolution of the word’, which works against establishing a stable self in language. However, less well understood is the role in Thomas’s distinctive ‘process’ vision played by scientific discourses – the new physics, Darwinism and Freudianism – which, if they could endorse an organicist, even primitivist vision, could also profoundly relativise it. Part of this chapter’s purpose, then, is to trace the general influence of science on Thomas via popularizing works by cosmologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, James Jeans and Arthur Eddington, and contemporary discourses concerning gland surgery and hormone synthesis.