Most people are introduced to the poems of Dylan Thomas at school, where he often proves to be very popular. But does he have anything to say to anyone over, say, 30?

His wife Caitlin- who was not one to mince her words- maintained that in his later poems he was simply rehashing his adolescence.

And when fellow Welshman John Cale was researching Dylan Thomas for a project of his own based on the poet's life and work, he came to the conclusion that DT was a pitifully weak individual in his personal conduct.

My own feeling these days is that Thomas tended to favour the SOUND of words for their own sake rather than their SENSE.

Why is he still popular? Because he died young and with a colourful reputation as a boozer; all this fed the legend.

Discuss.

"The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive"- Dylan, aged 19.

Make up your own mind:


A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
Dylan Thomas


Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other

"...merely rehashing his adolescence" - I suppose Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality was merely rehashing his childhood.... Caitlin Thomas was a talentless, jealous woman. Try Fern Hill to see what I mean:



Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Paul Ferris' biography of Dylan Thomas is pretty even-handed, acknowledging both his talent and the less positive uses to which it was put. Here's the opening sentence:

"I have tried to understand Dylan Thomas as a figure who, despite an air of fraudulence at times, was truly obsessed with his vocation as a poet: a tormented, exaggerated man, often his own worst enemy, in whom others may recognize their own experiences both of happiness and of defeat..."

I wouldn't say strictly but he is extremely popular with boyos.

Yes, a modern-day rock band would have an army of helpers to handle the arrangements for the kind of touring Thomas undertook in the States; he was just handed a railway ticket and an address and told to get on with it.

Wish I'd done better; here are some comments by other people which might be helpful:

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Dylan_Thomas/1093/comments

It's the difference between logos and mythos, perhaps - the one reaching for literal commonsense, the other reaching beyond to the otherwise-inarticulate, and perhaps failing oftener, or certainly making a lot less sense in logos terms - but not in its own.

Did Dylan Thomas ever really grow up?

Consider Under Milkwood:

Llareggub (famously, "Bugger all" backwards), No-Good Boyo, Organ Morgan...there's a good deal of schoolyard humour amongst the more impressive passages of surrealistic nightspeak.