Die Poesie von Dylan Thomas: Unter der Rechtschreibmauer von John Goodby (englisch) Pap

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The Poetry of Dylan Thomas

by John Goodby

An important reappraisal of the poetry of Dylan Thomas in terms of modern critical theory.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

Published in anticipation of the centenary of the poet's birth, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas is the first study of the poet to show how his work may be read in terms of contemporary critical concerns, using theories of modernism, the body, gender, the carnivalesque, language, hybridity and the pastoral in order to view it in an original light. Moreover, in presenting a Dylan Thomas who has real significance for twenty-first century readers, it shows that such a reappraisal also requires us to re-think some of the ways in which all post-Waste Land British poetry has been read in the last few decades.

Author Biography

John Goodby is Professor of English at Swansea University. He is editing a special centenary edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (Dent / New Directions, 2014)

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsPrefaceAbbreviationsIntroduction: The critical fates of Dylan Thomas1. 'Eggs laid by tigers': process and the politics of mannerist modernism2. 'Under the spelling wall': language and style3. 'Libidinous betrayal': body-mind, sex and gender4. 'My jack of Christ': hybridity, the gothic-grotesque and surregionalism5. 'Near and fire neighbours': war, apocalypse and elegy6. 'That country kind': Cold War pastoral, carnival and the late styleConclusion: 'The liquid choirs of his tribes': Dylan Thomas as icon, influence and intertextBibliographyIndex

Review

Written with elan, dexterity and wit, and with an immersion in both critical theory and the history of twentieth century poetry, Under the Spelling Wall has a natural authority, as well as a decisive narrative drive. The range of works proposed for inclusion, and the way in which they are interrelated represents something magnificent in contemporary criticism, a lauding of complexity not in the abstract but in the minutiae of what was published, and how that occurred. The reading of 'Altarwise by Owl-light' is sublimely good and the work on 'Fern Hill' is the most impressive I have ever seen on this poem. It is a model of the single author studies that are formative to a (renewed) critical direction. In many ways this is a brilliant book. Not only does it offer cogent advocacy of Thomas's strength and interest as a poet, it also does so in terms of a many-aspected, adroit and illuminating deployment of the theoretical discourses which have emerged over the last forty years. These two endeavours are, as they should be, mutually reinforcing: the theories really do prove themselves to be illuminating about Thomas, and as a result we feel that Thomas can speak to our contemporary condition and understanding. The argument is passionate, and makes no pretence at any aim other than reasserting the greatness of Thomas's work. The definitive modern reappraisal of Thomas's poetry ... Goodby's arguments are compelling and draw upon his experience both as a critic and as a practising (and prize-winning) poet. ...This is a welcome and overdue book which will do much to stimulate interest in Dylan Thomas as we approach the centenary of his birth. A great book ... Dylan Thomas for our generation, alive and entire. Dylan Thomas - now there was a poet. He published (a few) slim volumes of verse, fought wild women night and day, and drank (apparently, he drank). He could charm a female patron into buying him a house (more than once), wrote a handful of hits for the anthologies (as well as a larger body of obscurer work), and died young - too young. All nature was his - "Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge" and the rest. Wouldn't you like to have met Mr Thomas? Paul Ferris, who would go on to become one of Thomas's biographers, did meet him, albeit briefly, around 1949, in the saloon bar of Swansea's bombed-out Metropole Hotel. Looking, like the Met, a "bit weary", the poet was standing at the counter, "surrounded by people trying to buy him drinks". They were eventually introduced, Ferris recalls. Thomas said one dry yet dutifully treasured line to him - "and turned back to his drink". "He was never safe from his admirers", the biographer remarks, "or they from him." Ferris's anecdote fills a page in Dylan Thomas: A centenary celebration, edited by Thomas's granddaughter Hannah Ellis. Its pages are full of wide-ranging reminiscences about encountering the writing as well as the writer. Ellis has comedians (Terry Jones, Griff Rhys Jones) open and close proceedings, while the expected stories of early discovery and heartfelt tributes come from a former President of the United States (Jimmy Carter), a former Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams), the musician Cerys Matthews, the actor Michael Sheen and many others. Affection endures, the collection would seem to say, well beyond the selective band of admirers of, say, 18 Poems. It is an impressively eclectic crowd to be still, as it were, sidling up and trying to buy Dylan a pint. There are even a few fellow poets (besides Rowan Williams, that is, whose contribution is in verse), one of whom, Owen Sheers, represents many, in that his contribution is inspired by his interviews with others such as Simon Armitage and Jo Shapcott for a centennial Thomas documentary; and Armitage's marginal notes on Thomas, boiling the poems down to "fundamentals" ("love", "birth", "death"), have a familiar, ur-schoolroom ring to them. Sheers himself admits that at school he was taught not Dylan but R. S. Thomas - but "it still feels as if he's always been there, right from the early days of my reading life". The only poem named in his contribution is, inevitably, that late recreation of early days, "Fern Hill". The expected Thomas works have inspired much of the celebrations of the past year "Fern Hill", "Do not go gentle into that good night", Under Milk Wood - the expected Thomas works, and the seemingly still wonderful story of his life, have inspired much of the celebrations of the past year. In Wales and well beyond, there have been talks and tours, concerts, school workshops, exhibitions, television and theatre dramatizations. Andy Goddard's film Set Fire to the Stars dramatizes a "bohemian" week in the United States in the company of John Malcolm Brinnin. And in print, following Ferris's biography (1977), the earlier one by Constantine FitzGibbon (1965) and the later one by Andrew Lycett (2003), as well as the publication of Thomas's notebooks, letters, film scripts, collected broadcasts, a Life of Caitlin Thomas, and much more, a demand apparently remains - meaning not only for Ellis's "centenary celebration", but The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas by Hilly Janes (inspired by the three portraits of Thomas produced by her father, Alfred Janes). For Janes, Thomas's third "life" - really the afterlife that began on November 9, 1953, when he died in New York - has itself become worthy of extended consideration. She begins it with her father Fred at work on his third portrait of Thomas, "working from memory and a few black-and-white photos", and ends with enthusiasm for this year's "Dylan Thomas 100" celebrations, mingled with suspicions that the old English doubts about Thomas linger on. Under Milk Wood has also reappeared in a centenary edition with an introduction by Catherine Zeta-Jones (whose father owned a sweet factory and whose mother was a seamstress, in a personal variation on the play's romance between the draper Mog Edwards and sweetshop keeper Myfanwy Price). So much for his friend Daniel Jones's belief that a "handful of poems" would outlast the fame of Thomas's "play for voices" - and so much for the "Blakean and modernist revolutionary" beloved of John Goodby, the editor of the "new centenary edition" of Thomas's Collected Poems, and the author of a complementary study, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the spelling wall. In the autumn issue of Poetry Wales, Professor Goodby has complained about the proceedings gathered under the chemical-sounding title "DT-100" that, for all the many welcome things that have happened, especially in educational terms, they have seen Dylan Thomas the serious poet sidelined and replaced with "Dilute Dylan" - "Thomas-without-tears". Goodby's complaint follows naturally from his edition of the poems and his thorough, equally polemical critical study. In his view, Thomas was a unique hybrid writer: his common touch and his radicalism go hand in hand; the "very popular" performer, broadcaster and writer of comic short stories, the barstool bohemian who once came close to writing a radio comedy called "Quid's Inn" and wanted one day to write a film about the life of Charles Dickens, was also "an unreconstructed representative of the bardic sublime and ... a genuinely difficult modernist poet". Goodby is at pains to respect the populist side of the work even as he focuses intensely on trying to account for the uncompromising modernist responsible for, for example: Now Say nay, Man day man, Dry lover mine The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor, Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust, Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger. Just as Collected Poems is not wall-to-wall impermeable obscurity - it would be difficult to make a deep difficulty out of "In my craft or sullen art" or "The Hunchback in the Park" - it wouldn't do to overstate the radicalism of work such as "Now", of which this is the first stanza, with its sure-footed patterning (each subsequent stanza follows the same climbing sequence of steps, the opening three words over two lines). And when asked what it meant, Thomas suggested, perhaps disingenuously, that "so far as he knew it had no meaning at all". This doesn't stop Goodby reading it as a poem about suicide, in which negatives cancel one another out. He glosses the first stanza thus: "Now say no [you] dry lover and mine [explode; but also 'belonging to me'] the base [in both senses] deadrock [play on 'bedrock'] of the self, and blow [let blossom] the flowered anchor of hope if he [the dry lover], drawn to the centre [tyrannical self-centredness], should hop in the dust and foolishly forsake the hardiness of [a generous] anger". Is that clear? Or might one not sigh, as Sinbad Sailors does over "beautiful, beautiful Gossamer B.", "I wish you were not so educated"? For that reader who is prepared to put in the necessary work, whatever the rewards for doing so (the "lovelorn paper" in "My hero bares his nerves" may be read as writing paper or tissue paper, the one receiving the young poet's words, the other another kind of "unruly scrawl"), Goodby's centenary edition of the Collected Poems will be all that is needed. Here are valiant attempts to unpick almost every such metaphysical convolution in the oeuvre, an enthusiastic and informative introduction, and even, squashed between "Do not go gentle" and "In the White Giant's Thigh", a recently discovered drinking song purportedly written in "Henneky's Long bar High Holborn", as the single autograph copy has it, in 1951. No slight is intended by calling this wistful doggerel (doggerel has its place, and here it is), down to the Milk Wood-style name of the proprietor: Oh, all drinks were free (And cigarettes as well) In Mr Watts-Ewers' Brand-new hotel - This seems to be only in keeping with the vein of humour that runs through the collection, as "A Letter to my Aunt, Discussing the Correct Approach to Modern Poetry" and the odd limerick disrupt the chronological/biographical progress from youthful experiments to cosmically enhanced remarks on a time of war ("Deaths and Entrances", "Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred") to what survives of a projected longer work in Thomas's final decade and the verses from Under Milk Wood. Nevertheless, as the reader ploughs on, it becomes apparent that page references in the running headers would have been very helpful - the endnotes, which resort to "=" with code-cracking frequency, turn out to be essential reading, even for some of the squibs. Dylan Thomas has lost the attention of academics, with only three critical studies appearing in the past forty years Thomas was once a major figure in histories of British poetry of the twentieth century; his fame, to the chagrin of the naysayers, spread further than even the bitterest criticism could hope to prevent. He has lost the attention of academics, however, with only three critical studies ("two of which are introductory works of around 130 pages"), on Goodby's count, appearing in the past forty years. Apparently, that matters. The drastic decline may have something to do with the basic instability of Thomas's work - the unending identity crisis that is the work brought together in Collected Poems - and his refusal to fall in with any group (such as the New Country poets, whose manifesto Thomas declined to sign), to fit in with either "mainstream" or "modern" critical narratives. He "embarrasses an empirical poetics" but also "cocks a snook at the avant-garde" - a difficult case, indeed. "Difficult" poetry tends to try people's patience. If they cannot understand it on a single reading, they may well enter - as T. S. Eliot so Eliotically noted - a "state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic reception". Out of such a state emerge cries against a poet's vapidity masquerading as profundity, perverse obscurantism, or sheer silliness. Thomas encountered such criticism when he emerged on the 1930s scene, and it is easy to see why. In a letter of 1934, he put down his own "obscurity" to the "unfashionable" cause of a "preconceived symbolism derived ... from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy". Stephen Spender suspected that this was verse on tap, formless and meaningless, turned on and off at will. Geoffrey Grigson contended that Thomas worked "as a child works, towards form and coherence", and plucked lines from a single poem to suggest that their order didn't actually matter. Thomas's poems of the 1930s, acclaimed for their musicality and vigour, tended to leave both enemies and admirers alike in the dark, where some of them were happy to remain indefinitely. Walford Davies, in his introduction to the Selected Poems of 1974, aims a pitchfork at Grigson's "glum sabotage", but is obliged to supply glosses of the kind Goodby takes to new heights. Thomas's friends and supporters would have agreed that it wasn't always easy to understand him, and maybe gone along with Eliot's suggestion that "the more seasoned reader" of difficult poetry "does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first". It is unsurprising that Grigson threw up his hands and complained that a poem such as "How soon the servant sun" made "no sense at all", but it is just as true that Vernon Watkins, Thomas's confidant in sullen craft, found that one and "Now" too much, and suggested they be dropped from Thomas's Twenty-Five Poems (1936). Empson, despite his doubts, gamely took Thomas's poems with him when "refugeeing" in China in the late 1930s because they were "inexhaustible". "I think an annotated edition of Dylan Thomas ought to be prepared as soon as possible", he wrote the year after Thomas's death, in a review of the somewhat slimmer Collected Poems of the time: "there is still a lot of his poetry where I can feel it works and yet can't see why". In Goodby's eyes, it is this, the more challenging side of Thomas that has been unduly neglected during the centenary celebrations of the past year, not least by Literature Wales, a body whose funding for DT-100 comes from the Welsh government's tourism budget, and that seems to him, despite its name, to evince "disrespect" for literature. Celebrate "Fern Hill", " Poem in October" and a comical day in the life of Llareggub (say it backwards, if you must), in other words, but don't forget: Thomas was also a visionary whose verses express a concern with fundamental issues of birth, death, sex, faith, (im)mortality, "whose work is experimental and bypasses social surfaces". When others were waxing Audenesque, Thomas was all but Surreal. He risked charges of blasphemy and obscenity, writing forcefully about the body at a time when, as Andre Schuller observes in a study of Eliot, "the 'body' as a source of motivation still carried strongly negative moral connotations, and the idea of 'rational' systems being motivated by bodily needs still aroused disgust and indignation in many". (Robert Graves irascibly picked up on this theme when he dismissed Thomas, whom he never met, as "a syphilitic Welshman who failed to pay the bills".) Allusions in, say, "There was a saviour" to "radium" and the "drooping of our homes" in the Blitz contradict the view that Thomas turned away completely, or complacently, from images of the twentieth century in favour of bucolic nostalgia; by some accounts, the war was the making of this pacifist poet, as the bombings and the circling of death over life brought his cosmic conception of the universe into awful focus. Hence Goodby's hot contention that Thomas was "the first great elegist of the civilian war dead": "he writes for Gaza and Homs as well [as] the victims of the Blitz". And his most "difficult" work ought not to be hidden away as "dirty secrets". Disdain for Thomas is nothing new. Grigson is one of many critics hostile to Thomas with whom Goodby stoutly engages in the introduction to The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, and personal animus only one of several causes of a more widespread disdain. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Louis MacNeice might have been admirers, but the Movement poets, with the exception as always of Philip Larkin, were not. A class element makes itself known in Spender's admission of a fear about dirty boots on the genteel carpet of the 1930s poetry scene. Scrutiny took against Thomas, too, a cue that Goodby believes Cambridge has generally chosen to follow up to the present day. Michael Schmidt is taken to exemplify latter-day "empiricist exasperation" with the bardic, unruly Thomas. There is "an essay to be written about Thomas and the suburbs and why his suburban-ness offended the likes of George Steiner and Terry [sic] Hawkes so intensely". "Altarwise by Owl-light" is perhaps the most taxing case of all, one that created a poetry world teacup-storm at the time of its first publication in 1935-6. (Maybe the handily rediscovered notebook that sold at auction at Sotheby's this month, and which contains the only known manuscript copy of the sequence, will help to shed some light on its inner depths.) Empson described it in 1971 as the "most obscure" and the "most static" of Thomas's poems, "a succession of minatory gnomic lines, each of them almost complete in itself". Yet Empson refused to believe that the poem had no connecting thread, even if he could not find it, and gave weight to his recollection of something Thomas said to him in the pub in 1941, in response to George Barker's latest volume: "No man has the right to throw a bucket of sheer nonsense into the public's face". In the new Collected Poems, elucidating each "Altarwise" sonnet takes pages, and going back to the sequence is barely any more rewarding. Thomas's nonsense, if that's what it was, was not his alone: in his mimicry of other poets lie clues to his own practices, too. At the time of that "bucket of nonsense" remark, both he and Empson were visiting John Davenport, the musical friend with whom Thomas collaborated on The Death of the King's Canary. This mock-detective novel, set aside in 1941, only to be scraped out of the barrel and published in 1976, tells of the Prime Minister being forced - horror of horrors - to read the works of various modern poets in order to choose a Poet Laureate. This is the cue for some robust parodies of various contemporaries, including a "Lamentable Ode" by the Surrealist "Albert Ponting" ("The urge of the purge of the womb of the worm"), the Eliot-like "West Abelard" ("Even the end is similar. It ends / And there's an end") and so on. Roy Fuller, reviewing the novel in the TLS, had trouble believing that the verse parodies were Thomas's. Yet here they are in the Collected Poems, three of them grouped under the heading "Parodies from The Death of the King's Canary", followed by a fourth, "Request to Leda (Homage to William Empson)", with its misleading subtitle originating in an Empson special issue of Horizon of July 1942. The irreverent tone of this incomplete villanelle betrays its origins in the abandoned novel. Such impersonations were apparently crucial to Thomas's "process poetic" - "I am in the path of Blake", he told Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1933, "but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are in sight" - most famously exemplified in his serious adoption of the villanelle form, the deeply personal "Do not go gentle" (about his dying father, "The only person I can't show the little enclosed poem to", he told a correspondent). Likewise, much earlier, he had tried out the Audenesque voice, while "And Death shall have no dominion" recalls Donne's Holy Sonnet "Death, be not proud", and "There was a saviour" echoes the verse form of Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity". When it comes to The Death of the King's Canary, the joke may ultimately have been on Thomas himself. The Surrealist's "womb of the worm" sounds Dylanesque, while the fey send-up of Spender ("O young man ... / We could have watched the dawn rise over Munchen / Or gathered chestnuts under Hanniker Hill") is just as corporeal and paradoxical ("O enemy not of my choice") as some of Thomas's own wartime verses. As Amanda French puts it (in the online version of her doctoral thesis, Refrain, Again: The return of the villanelle), "It may be that his clear-sighted recognition of the faults of his contemporaries was matched with a too-clear recognition that his own verse too often shared many of the same faults, and this comparison would undoubtedly have contributed to the lyrical paralysis Thomas notoriously suffered from, especially after 1945". Working out what was right and what was wrong with his poetry turned on a larger confrontation with what was wrong and what was right with British poetry as a whole. A man apart? Anything but. He was also, in the beginning, another kind of imitator. The teenage Thomas filled notebook after notebook with visions and revisions, out of which much of the published work of the 1930s was to emerge: a "massive, never-to-be-repeated, testosterone-fuelled outpouring", as Jeff Towns enthuses in his contribution to Dylan Thomas: A centenary celebration. But the outpouring was to be contained and reworked for years to come. Towns's "'Borrowed Plumes' - Requiem for a Plagiarist" considers a subject Goodby does not dwell on. Thomas plagiarized what was thought to be his first published work, "His Requiem", published in the Western Mail in 1927 when he was about twelve. The subterfuge was only uncovered, remarkably, when somebody read the poem in 1971 and recalled that it had previously appeared in the Boy's Own Paper. Likewise, "Sometimes", submitted to the school magazine, turned out to be the work of the American Thomas S. Jones, nabbed this time from Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia. Last year Towns thought he had found an "unknown and unrecorded" poem - then he happened to turn on the television and heard something impossible: Idris Elba reading it out on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year programme. How could that be? It was, of course, another borrowed plume plucked from the works of another cannily chosen, unsung source, the sometime Poet Laureate of Michigan, Edgar Guest. Towns takes Eliot's maxim about immature poets imitating and mature poets stealing as his rueful epigraph. Why steal, when you have talent? In their biographies, Ferris and Lycett suggest that Thomas felt the need to impress others (and in particular, Lycett suggests, "his remote father") when he made off with these competent but conventional works. Towns offers an alternative theory: Thomas was already, before his twenties, disgusted by the idea of writing anything except for his "new visceral poems" but, "compelled" to show up with something, mischievously offered up these inferior works instead. Buying himself time, perhaps, already obsessed with those fatal fundamentals - but courting popularity. And there you have the Dylan Thomas paradox in nuce, as reflected in the bifurcated centenary celebrations of 2014, blithe walking tours proceeding around Swansea and south Oxfordshire unperturbed by the fist-shaking of an irate editor of the Collected Poems. Michael Caines is an editor at the TLS. His most recent book, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, was published last year. This is a fascinating example of how profoundly enlivening and intellectually challenging the single-author study can be. That this is only the beginning - one hopes - of a serious reconsideration of Thomas' poetry suddenly makes the present a great place to be.

Promotional

Written by the editor of the centenary edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas.Major broadsheet, television and radio features on Thomas planned, in which the author is already involved.The first book length engagement with the work of Dylan Thomas that utilises contemporary critical theory.

Review Text

Dylan Thomas - now there was a poet. He published (a few) slim volumes of verse, fought wild women night and day, and drank (apparently, he drank). He could charm a female patron into buying him a house (more than once), wrote a handful of hits for the anthologies (as well as a larger body of obscurer work), and died young - too young. All nature was his - "Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge" and the rest. Wouldn''t you like to have met Mr Thomas?Paul Ferris, who would go on to become one of Thomas''s biographers, did meet him, albeit briefly, around 1949, in the saloon bar of Swansea''s bombed-out Metropole Hotel. Looking, like the Met, a "bit weary", the poet was standing at the counter, "surrounded by people trying to buy him drinks". They were eventually introduced, Ferris recalls. Thomas said one dry yet dutifully treasured line to him - "and turned back to his drink". "He was never safe from his admirers", the biographer remarks, "or they from him."Ferris''s anecdote fills a page in Dylan Thomas: A centenary celebration, edited by Thomas''s granddaughter Hannah Ellis. Its pages are full of wide-ranging reminiscences about encountering the writing as well as the writer. Ellis has comedians (Terry Jones, Griff Rhys Jones) open and close proceedings, while the expected stories of early discovery and heartfelt tributes come from a former President of the United States (Jimmy Carter), a former Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams), the musician Cerys Matthews, the actor Michael Sheen and many others. Affection endures, the collection would seem to say, well beyond the selective band of admirers of, say, 18 Poems.It is an impressively eclectic crowd to be still, as it were, sidling up and trying to buy Dylan a pint. There are even a few fellow poets (besides Rowan Williams, that is, whose contribution is in verse), one of whom, Owen Sheers, represents many, in that his contribution is inspired by his interviews with others such as Simon Armitage and Jo Shapcott for a centennial Thomas documentary; and Armitage''s marginal notes on Thomas, boiling the poems down to "fundamentals" ("love", "birth", "death"), have a familiar, ur-schoolroom ring to them. Sheers himself admits that at school he was taught not Dylan but R. S. Thomas - but "it still feels as if he''s always been there, right from the early days of my reading life". The only poem named in his contribution is, inevitably, that late recreation of early days, "Fern Hill".The expected Thomas works have inspired much of the celebrations of the past year"Fern Hill", "Do not go gentle into that good night", Under Milk Wood - the expected Thomas works, and the seemingly still wonderful story of his life, have inspired much of the celebrations of the past year. In Wales and well beyond, there have been talks and tours, concerts, school workshops, exhibitions, television and theatre dramatizations. Andy Goddard''s film Set Fire to the Stars dramatizes a "bohemian" week in the United States in the company of John Malcolm Brinnin. And in print, following Ferris''s biography (1977), the earlier one by Constantine FitzGibbon (1965) and the later one by Andrew Lycett (2003), as well as the publication of Thomas''s notebooks, letters, film scripts, collected broadcasts, a Life of Caitlin Thomas, and much more, a demand apparently remains - meaning not only for Ellis''s "centenary celebration", but The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas by Hilly Janes (inspired by the three portraits of Thomas produced by her father, Alfred Janes). For Janes, Thomas''s third "life" - really the afterlife that began on November 9, 1953, when he died in New York - has itself become worthy of extended consideration. She begins it with her father Fred at work on his third portrait of Thomas, "working from memory and a few black-and-white photos", and ends with enthusiasm for this year''s "Dylan Thomas 100" celebrations, mingled with suspicions that the old English doubts about Thomas linger on.Under Milk Wood has also reappeared in a centenary edition with an introduction by Catherine Zeta-Jones (whose father owned a sweet factory and whose mother was a seamstress, in a personal variation on the play''s romance between the draper Mog Edwards and sweetshop keeper Myfanwy Price). So much for his friend Daniel Jones''s belief that a "handful of poems" would outlast the fame of Thomas''s "play for voices" - and so much for the "Blakean and modernist revolutionary" beloved of John Goodby, the editor of the "new centenary edition" of Thomas''s Collected Poems, and the author of a complementary study, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the spelling wall. In the autumn issue of Poetry Wales, Professor Goodby has complained about the proceedings gathered under the chemical-sounding title "DT-100" that, for all the many welcome things that have happened, especially in educational terms, they have seen Dylan Thomas the serious poet sidelined and replaced with "Dilute Dylan" - "Thomas-without-tears".Goodby''s complaint follows naturally from his edition of the poems and his thorough, equally polemical critical study. In his view, Thomas was a unique hybrid writer: his common touch and his radicalism go hand in hand; the "very popular" performer, broadcaster and writer of comic short stories, the barstool bohemian who once came close to writing a radio comedy called "Quid''s Inn" and wanted one day to write a film about the life of Charles Dickens, was also "an unreconstructed representative of the bardic sublime and . . . a genuinely difficult modernist poet". Goodby is at pains to respect the populist side of the work even as he focuses intensely on trying to account for the uncompromising modernist responsible for, for example:NowSay nay,Man day man,Dry lover mineThe deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.Just as Collected Poems is not wall-to-wall impermeable obscurity - it would be difficult to make a deep difficulty out of "In my craft or sullen art" or "The Hunchback in the Park" - it wouldn''t do to overstate the radicalism of work such as "Now", of which this is the first stanza, with its sure-footed patterning (each subsequent stanza follows the same climbing sequence of steps, the opening three words over two lines). And when asked what it meant, Thomas suggested, perhaps disingenuously, that "so far as he knew it had no meaning at all". This doesn''t stop Goodby reading it as a poem about suicide, in which negatives cancel one another out. He glosses the first stanza thus: "Now say no [you] dry lover and mine [explode; but also ''belonging to me''] the base [in both senses] deadrock [play on ''bedrock''] of the self, and blow [let blossom] the flowered anchor of hope if he [the dry lover], drawn to the centre [tyrannical self-centredness], should hop in the dust and foolishly forsake the hardiness of [a generous] anger". Is that clear? Or might one not sigh, as Sinbad Sailors does over "beautiful, beautiful Gossamer B.", "I wish you were not so educated"?For that reader who is prepared to put in the necessary work, whatever the rewards for doing so (the "lovelorn paper" in "My hero bares his nerves" may be read as writing paper or tissue paper, the one receiving the young poet''s words, the other another kind of "unruly scrawl"), Goodby''s centenary edition of the Collected Poems will be all that is needed. Here are valiant attempts to unpick almost every such metaphysical convolution in the oeuvre, an enthusiastic and informative introduction, and even, squashed between "Do not go gentle" and "In the White Giant''s Thigh", a recently discovered drinking song purportedly written in "Henneky''s Long bar High Holborn", as the single autograph copy has it, in 1951. No slight is intended by calling this wistful doggerel (doggerel has its place, and here it is), down to the Milk Wood-style name of the proprietor:Oh, all drinks were free(And cigarettes as well)In Mr Watts-Ewers''Brand-new hotel -This seems to be only in keeping with the vein of humour that runs through the collection, as "A Letter to my Aunt, Discussing the Correct Approach to Modern Poetry" and the odd limerick disrupt the chronological/biographical progress from youthful experiments to cosmically enhanced remarks on a time of war ("Deaths and Entrances", "Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred") to what survives of a projected longer work in Thomas''s final decade and the verses from Under Milk Wood. Nevertheless, as the reader ploughs on, it becomes apparent that page references in the running headers would have been very helpful - the endnotes, which resort to "=" with code-cracking frequency, turn out to be essential reading, even for some of the squibs.Dylan Thomas has lost the attention of academics, with only three critical studies appearing in the past forty yearsThomas was once a major figure in histories of British poetry of the twentieth century; his fame, to the chagrin of the naysayers, spread further than even the bitterest criticism could hope to prevent. He has lost the attention of academics, however, with only three critical studies ("two of which are introductory works of around 130 pages"), on Goodby''s count, appearing in the past forty years. Apparently, that matters. The drastic decline may have something to do with the basic instability of Thomas''s work - the unending identity crisis that is the work brought together in Collected Poems - and his refusal to fall in with any group (such as the New Country poets, whose manifesto Thomas declined to sign), to fit in with either "mainstream" or "modern" critical narratives. He "embarrasses an empirical poetics" but also "cocks a snook at the avant-garde" - a difficult case, indeed."Difficult" poetry tends to try people''s patience. If they cannot understand it on a single reading, they may well enter - as T. S. Eliot so Eliotically noted - a "s

Review Quote

This is a fascinating example of how profoundly enlivening and intellectually challenging the single-author study can be. That this is only the beginning - one hopes - of a serious reconsideration of Thomas' poetry suddenly makes the present a great place to be. Amy McCauley, New Welsh Review

Promotional "Headline"

Written by the editor of the centenary edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas.Major broadsheet, television and radio features on Thomas planned, in which the author is already involved.The first book length engagement with the work of Dylan Thomas that utilises contemporary critical theory.

Description for Sales People

Written by the editor of the centenary edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas.Major broadsheet, television and radio features on Thomas planned, in which the author is already involved.The first book length engagement with the work of Dylan Thomas that utilises contemporary critical theory.

Details ISBN1781381151 Author John Goodby Short Title POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS Pages 512 Publisher Liverpool University Press Language English ISBN-10 1781381151 ISBN-13 9781781381151 Media Book Format Paperback Residence Hull, ENK Birth 1958 Year 2014 Publication Date 2014-10-17 Subtitle Under the Spelling Wall Series Number 60 Imprint Liverpool University Press Place of Publication Liverpool Country of Publication United Kingdom AU Release Date 2014-10-17 NZ Release Date 2014-10-17 UK Release Date 2014-10-17 Alternative 9781846318764 DEWEY 821.912 Audience Tertiary & Higher Education Series Liverpool English Texts and Studies

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  • Condition: Neu
  • ISBN-13: 9781781381151
  • Type: NA
  • Publication Name: NA
  • ISBN: 9781781381151
  • Publication Year: 2014
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Book Title: The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: under the Spelling Wall
  • Item Height: 234mm
  • Author: John Goodby
  • Publisher: Liverpool University Press
  • Topic: Literature
  • Item Width: 156mm
  • Number of Pages: 512 Pages

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