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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Dylan Thomas and the Lit. Club

Dylan Thomas and the Lit. Club

There was a large attendance at the Literary Club on July 13th to hear J.K. Baxter speak on Dylan Thomas. His address proved to be both stimulating and sound, the result of a fruitful acquaintance with the work of this poet.

Dylan Thomas, who showed great promise in his early poems of 1934, has fulfilled this promise by finding a more mature manner, seen best in the collection entitled Deaths and Entrances. However, he has not yet come to the end of his continual development.

Thomas is perhaps the most considerable of the young generation of English poets. One reason for this is his originality and integrity. Unlike many left-wing poets of the Thirties, Thomas has never said what he thought he should say, but always what he wanted to – even if this was occasionally badly said, or not worth saying. He has had the rare courage to tackle honestly his deepest personal problems, and it is in the attempt to see and feel clearly that lies the meaning of his poetry. Seen as both a creative and destructive principle, death and sin, are characteristic themes.

Thomas’s poetry is rather an explanation than a record – a reaching outpage 43 rather than a classification. His poetic manner, for he has one, is rather dynamic than static. It is by reason of these qualities that his symbolism has, at best, an emotional content only, achieved by the greatest poets. Yeats makes his poetry, arrives at spontaneity through the intellect. Thomas is rather making himself by self-expression in poetry. But what he gains by this way in immediacy and richness of imagery, he often loses in coherency and clearness. Many of the so-called obscurities are regarded as purely emotional statements.

One sure sign of Thomas’s greater stature is his gusto in the use of language. This is shown in his inveterate trick of punning, whether seriously and successfully undertaken or not. Indeed verbal invention is essential to the poet who gropes for half-realised ideas and sensations, in order to express what is peculiar to him, and has not been said before in those terms. It is not enough for a poet to feel more deeply or more subtly, he must be able to communicate his experience by means of a greater sensitivity to language.

Thomas’s poetry is not for the intelligence alone but appeals as fitting to the emotions and senses as well. It should be read aloud and surrendered to, for its full effect.

1948 (34)