‘The Apocalyptic writing of Dylan Thomas’

Although the infamous ‘forties sneer’ is still to be heard in the land, it is now possible to treat Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptic movement with post-polemical respect. John Goodby documents a reception history that has tended to diminish Thomas by numerous strategies, but principally by failure to take the measure of his intelligence and gifts, permitting him only a subcategory of ‘genius’ so heavily taxed at source as to justify neglect. Yet neglect of Thomas is ruinous to any understanding of post-war modernism. My argument, here, is that to assign him a place in the modernist canon entails a reconsideration of the canon itself.

Having resolved a number of historical disputes, research on the Apocalypse has progressed. Attempts to dissever Thomas from the movement, or to draw distinctions (whether chronological or qualitative) between the Apocalypse and neo-Romanticism, ought no longer to darken counsel. There should be no need to refute the misconception that the decade in question, or any part of it, was a poetic doldrums. Once agreed to be intrinsically malign, Thomas's enabling influence can now be seen to extend beyond the Apocalyptic poets of the 1940s to include many post-war British poets, including some of the finest poets of the Movement of the 1950s.

Recent discoveries by Peter Manson among the papers of Dorian Cooke, from the earliest days of the Apocalyptic movement, include a draft by John Goodland of the proposal to Faber for ‘an anthology of post-Auden-Isherwood prose and poetry’, ‘mainly concerned with “apocalyptic” writing’. The proposal confirms that the original referent of the ‘adjective’, for the founders of the Apocalyptic movement, was Dylan Thomas: ‘we think Miss Bowen uses this adjective for the first time as applied to Dylan Thomas in her introduction to “The Faber Book of Modern Stories”’.