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The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall

John Goodby

Pages: 1 - 256

Swansea University Author: John Goodby

Abstract

The first full-length account of Thomas’s poetry since 1966 (135,000 word monograph), with subsidiary treatment of selected short stories, film-scripts and Under Milk Wood. It reads Thomas as a Gothic-grotesque and mannerist modernist, or Blakeian surre(gion)alist, who fused High Modernist ‘difficul...

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ISBN: 9781846318764 978-1-846-31994-5
Published: Liverpool Liverpool University Press 2013
Online Access: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/41243/
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa11174
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Abstract: The first full-length account of Thomas’s poetry since 1966 (135,000 word monograph), with subsidiary treatment of selected short stories, film-scripts and Under Milk Wood. It reads Thomas as a Gothic-grotesque and mannerist modernist, or Blakeian surre(gion)alist, who fused High Modernist ‘difficulty’ and New Country traditional form. An overview of the critical history is followed by six chapters on: modernism and politics; language; the body; the gothic-grotesque and Welsh identity; WWII, performance and elegy; ‘Cold War pastoral’. By querying the usual slippage from poetry to person, the ‘Auden Generation’ myth of 1930s, and Movement demonization of 1940s poetry, Thomas’s marginalization in current debates on mid-century poetry is forcefully challenged; the conclusion argues that he continues to be an important influence on later poetry and an absent presence haunting contemporary accounts of modern British poetry. It will be a substantial contribution to the understanding of Thomas, Welsh writing in English, and mid-century Briths poetry.
Keywords: Dylan Thomas, poetry, modernism, gothic, grotesque, hybridity, postcolonialism, Welsh Writing in English, linguistic culturalism, WWII poetry, biomorphism, body, elegy, Eliot, Auden, New Country, surrealism, surregionalism, Cold War, pastoral, Blake, Donne, personal legend, Under Milk Wood, ecocriticism, revolution of the word, transition, Joyce, Lawrence, Caradoc Evans, Arthur Machen, Glyn Jones, Vernon Watkins, Pamela Hansford Johnson, carnivalesque, W. S. Graham, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Roy Fisher, apocalypse, metaphor, trickster, Wales
College: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Start Page: 1
End Page: 256