Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The critical fates of Dylan Thomas
- Chapter 1 ‘Eggs laid by tigers’: process and the politics of mannerist modernism
- Chapter 2 ‘Under the spelling wall’: language and style
- Chapter 3 ‘Libidinous betrayal’: body-mind, sex and gender
- Chapter 4 ‘My jack of Christ’: hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism
- Chapter 5 ‘Near and fire neighbours’: war, apocalypse and elegy
- Chapter 6 ‘That country kind’: Cold War pastoral, carnival and the late style
- Conclusion: ‘The liquid choirs of his tribes’: Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertext
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - ‘Eggs laid by tigers’: process and the politics of mannerist modernism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The critical fates of Dylan Thomas
- Chapter 1 ‘Eggs laid by tigers’: process and the politics of mannerist modernism
- Chapter 2 ‘Under the spelling wall’: language and style
- Chapter 3 ‘Libidinous betrayal’: body-mind, sex and gender
- Chapter 4 ‘My jack of Christ’: hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism
- Chapter 5 ‘Near and fire neighbours’: war, apocalypse and elegy
- Chapter 6 ‘That country kind’: Cold War pastoral, carnival and the late style
- Conclusion: ‘The liquid choirs of his tribes’: Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertext
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The social importance of lyric poetry … may not focus directly on the so-called social perspective or the social interests of the work of their authors. Instead, it must discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way [it] remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it. In philosophical terms, the approach must be an immanent one.
– Theodor Adorno.The appearance of Dylan here seems to be an unintegrated tradition.
– Jeffrey Ganz.‘The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’? Becoming a modernist
Dylan Thomas famously exploded onto the London literary scene with the publication of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in The Sunday Referee on 29 October 1933. A month later, Sir Richard Rees, the editor of The Adelphi, would write to the nineteenyear- old Thomas to inform him that poems he had submitted were too good for his journal and that he was passing them on to T. S. Eliot, via Herbert Read, for possible publication in The Criterion. William Empson later recalled that ‘What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing “The force that through the green fuse” … from that day he was a famous poet’, adding: ‘Thus began the Dylan Thomas revolt against the political poetry of the thirties, with Auden as its most brilliant exponent, in favour of a poetry of magic, religion, guilt or a world of personal relations’. ‘The force’ was followed by the publication of ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ in The Listener in March 1934, which drew enquiries to the editor about its author from Eliot and Geoffrey Grigson (and, in a sign of things to come, complaints from readers about its ‘obscenity’). It confirmed Thomas's arrival on the scene, and eight more poems in the same strange and forceful style appeared in national journals over the course of 1934. On 11 December, Thomas's first collection, 18 Poems, appeared from the Parton Press.
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- Information
- The Poetry of Dylan ThomasUnder the Spelling Wall, pp. 50 - 120Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013