It is unusual, to put it mildly, to consider Dylan Thomas's poetry in terms of its relationship to science. The complaint made as long ago as 1947 by Leslie Fiedler, that ‘nothing more modern than a ship’ appears in it, still strikes a chord, with Thomas regarded by most as a poet purely of organic and cosmic fundamentals. Supporters, as well as detractors, agree: Thomas's biographer Paul Ferris opined that ‘He was an answer to the machine; his poems contain few images from the twentieth century.’ Thomas's poetry, to this way of thinking, is defined by its opposition to the modern, at the heart of which is the scientific world-view. It may be permissible for his work to have ignored politics, such arguments usually proceed, but to have erased from it interwar society, shaped as that was by sweeping technological change, was surely a major error of omission. Thomas, so this case goes, was a neo-Romantic who ignored his own times, and the fact that modernity signified the reign of science and its various outcomes. Hence, it is concluded, the narrowness of his work, for all its undoubted maieutic and rhetorical power.

Of course, as Ezra Pound once proposed, literature is ‘“news that STAYS news”’, and such a critique often amounts to little more than a desire for the comfort of the standard overly sociological accounts of 1930s writing, a yearning for period references to Bakelite and chrome steel, the Comintern and Hitler. It may, in some cases, also signify resistance to the Joycean revolution of the word to which Thomas so thoroughly subscribed. But, even if we discount these prejudices, it is, in any case, astonishingly easy to disprove the charge of technophobia. How was it possible for Fiedler and Ferris to miss, among many other items ‘more modern than a ship’, the likes of ‘radium’, ‘carbolic’, a ballcock ‘cistern’, ‘celluloid’, ‘arclamps’, ‘macadam’, an aircraft ‘hangar’, car ‘gears’, ‘allotments’, coal-tips and oil-wells? And, as Thomas rightly – if slightly dodging the issue – pointed out to Henry Treece, when he suggested that his poetry lacked ‘social awareness’, ‘a good number of my images come from the cinema & the gramophone and the newspaper, while I use contemporary slang, cliché, and pun’.