The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney

Author:Seamus Heaney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-04-29T05:00:00+00:00

Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is by now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. Mention of his name is enough to turn on a multi-channel set of associations. There is Thomas the Voice, Thomas the Booze, Thomas the Debts, Thomas the Jokes, Thomas the Wales, Thomas the Sex, Thomas the Lies – in fact there are so many competing and revisionist inventions of Thomas available, so many more or less corrective, reductive, even punitive versions of the phenomenon that it is with a certain tentativeness that one asks whether there is still any place on the roll-call for Thomas the Poet.

Yet it was very much Thomas the Poet that my generation of readers and listeners encountered in our teens. He died at the age of thirty-nine in New York, immediately because of a wrongly prescribed dose of morphine, but inevitably because of years of spectacular drinking, and he died at the height of his fame, at the moment when print culture and the electronic media were perfecting their alliance in the promotion of culture heroes. Indeed, to recollect that moment is to have second thoughts about any easy condescension towards the role of the media in these areas. The records of Dylan Thomas reading his own poems, records which were lined up on the shelves of undergraduate flats all over the world, were important cultural events. They opened a thrilling line between the centre and the edges of the Anglophone world. For all of us young provincials, from Belfast to Brisbane, the impact of Thomas’s performance meant that we had a gratifying sense of access to something that was acknowledged to be altogether modern, difficult and poetry.

Later, of course, there were second thoughts, but Dylan Thomas will always remain part of the initiation of that first ‘eleven-plus’ generation into literary culture. He was our Swinburne, a poet of immediate spellbinding power. And yet nowadays he has become very much the Doubted Thomas. In this lecture, therefore, almost forty years after his death, I want to ask which parts of his Collected Poems retain their force. In the present climate of taste, his rhetorical surge and mythopoeic posture are unfashionable, and his bohemianism is probably suspect for all kinds of politically correct reasons, which only makes it all the more urgent to ask if there is not still something we can isolate and celebrate as Dylan the Durable.

Dylan Thomas was both a uniquely gifted writer and a recognizable type. Within the sociology of literature, he was a Welsh version of what Patrick Kavanagh called in the Irish context a ‘bucklepper’, which is to say, one who leaps like a young buck. The bucklepper, as you might guess, is somebody with a stereotypical sprightliness and gallivanting roguery, insufficiently self-aware and not necessarily spurious, but still offering himself or herself too readily as a form of spectator sport. Thomas’s Welshness, his high genius for exaggeration and for entertainment, his immense joie de vivre and

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