Dylan Thomas knew the part his poetry played in his “individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” While this baring “of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body” generated exciting imagery and rhetorical experiments sometimes baffling to readers, Thomas also insisted on communication to others engaged in the same struggle through “a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem”—what he called “narrative.” He said, “I believe in the simple thread of action through a poem, but that is an intellectual thing aimed at lucidity through narrative.” Though we may find his concept of narrative unusually broad, Thomas conceived of it as the life—a main moving column—that “must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.” This view of poetic creation as his personal dialectic of images complements Thomas' principal theme: the paradox of life creating and consuming itself.