Some criticism of Thomas attacks a misuse of language, whereby Thomas invokes an empty rhetoric to conceal the fact that there is a meaning or message lacking. Holbrook in his useful critical survey of English Literature, the Pelican Guide to English Literature series, The Present, records some of the more unfavorable reactions to Thomasīs work:
Dylan Thomasīs seductive language has provoked in some English poets a fierce resistance. Donald Davie has accused him of abandoning the task of articulation, so that the objects to which he refers, tumbled pell-mell together, can no longer be identified. C.H. Sisson acknowledges that Thomasīs obscurity was largely a willed effect, resulting from a deliberate revision of many drafts, but finds in the poems a lack of emotional and intellectual development which finally bores the reader . . . . David Holbrook finds in Thomas a disabling amorality, `leading towards the trivial and ultimately the inarticulate.ī (Ford 209-210)
But that is hardly complimentary to Thomas. No poet, by the very nature of his calling should be inarticulate, and I suspect it is a gross underestimation of Thomasīs control to so accuse him. In twentieth century literature, Modernism has had such an effect that language no longer bears the same relationship to life. Thomas is part of that change and it might not be too grandiose to claim that in his poetry he establishes and affirms a new relationship between language and life.
One way of looking at Thomasīs relationship to language might be usefully defined by comments in Jean-Paul Sartreīs What is Literature?, which attempts to explain the relationship between the poet and his words. Sartre suggests that the poet has "withdrawn from language instrument [the utilitarian use of language] in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs" (5). Sartre goes on to say:
All language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which represents rather than expresses meaning. (6-7)
The poet, Ted Hughes expresses a similar conception of the word as something organic and living in his definition of a poem:
It is better to call it an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit. The living parts are the words, the images, the rhythms. The spirit is the life which inhabits them when they all work together
What is interesting in both accounts is that the word becomes flesh. Thomas himself explores the religious connotations of this in his poem "In the Beginning" which restates the opening lines of St. Johnīs Gospel. He also examines the more fantastic implications of the word becoming flesh in his short story, "The Mouse and the Woman." Both Sartre and Hughes seem to be suggesting the autonomy of poetic language, and perhaps this explains, to some extent, the peculiarities of Thomasīs verse. For Thomas "words were not signs of something external to themselves, but the substance of poetry, in the same way that marble is the substance of sculpture" (Hillis Miller 195). It is this idea that the word is somehow tangible and organic which gives Thomasīs poems such energy and power.
That Thomasīs early poems are vital and powerful is clear. Vitality is certainly a part of his understanding of poetry in the early part of his career. He once said in a recorded poetry reading that he could no longer remember what "pumped and drove those lines along." But it is clearly an aspect of poems of Thomasīs like "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" (2553) and, "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night" (2554), the first a celebration of the obscure force that seems to drive life, (nature? time? God?) and the second a primal protest against the death of his father, and, indeed, death in general.
Each poem is driven by fierce syllabics (Thomas uses a strict syllable pattern in much of his poetry and often subordinates other organizing principles -- like rhyme-- to it) and offering language that at times seems to run away from Thomas. Rather than unpack those poems for you, Iīm going to invite you to explore them. Read them aloud and enjoy their rhythmic utterance, and see what you make of their meaning.
