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'"Lamp-posts and high-volted fruits": Scientific Discourse in the Work of Dylan Thomas'
John Goodby
Reading Dylan Thomas, ed. Edward Allen, Volume: 1, Issue: 1, Pages: 91 - 109
Swansea University Author: John Goodby
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Abstract
Developing an argument first raised in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013), this chapter explores the relationship between Dylan Thomas's poetry and contemporary scientific knowledge, referencing popular science titles published in the 1920s and 1930s and the advances in...
| Published in: | Reading Dylan Thomas, ed. Edward Allen |
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| ISSN: | 978-1-4744-1155-4 |
| Published: |
Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
2018
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa49125 |
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| Abstract: |
Developing an argument first raised in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013), this chapter explores the relationship between Dylan Thomas's poetry and contemporary scientific knowledge, referencing popular science titles published in the 1920s and 1930s and the advances in science known to Thomas through other media. The aim of the chapter is to show that, far from being a romantic anti-rationalist, Thomas was well aware of developments in hormone and gland science, post-Einsteinian physics, Darwinian biology, and psychology. These informed his 'process poetic' and its microcosmic/macrocosmic coordinates, and formed the basis for the struggle between determinism and free will played out in his early work. Thomas's interest in embryos / foetuses is linked to the homeostatic concept of the body developed by Walter Cannon and Lawrence J. Henderson, which opposed the determinism espoused by B. F. Skinner and other disciples of Jacques Loeb and Ivan Pavlov. Thomas's immersion in scientific discourse is seen, together with his processual attitude to language, to account for the fact that, while he shares his vitalism and archetypal blood and soil imagery with writers such as D.H. Lawrence, he does not share their reactionary essentialism (Joyce being the High Modernist Thomas most resembles in this regard). The final part of the chapter analyses Thomas's attribution, from the late 1930s on, of a redemptive role to sexual love, and his response to the horrific events of WWII. These, it is argued, led to a precariously holistic 'green' and proto-feminist vision of the natural world under the shadow of the Bomb. Finally, this section considers Thomas's attitude to religion - which many scientists for the time managed to reconcile with the new science - which is understood as more an interest in the mechanisms of belief and religious discourses than as faith as such. |
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| Item Description: |
As acknowledged in Edward Allen's Introduction, this volume arose from a symposium held at Cambridge University in November of 2014, Dylan Thomas's centenary year, which itself arose - as its publicity material noted - from my critical and editorial work on Thomas's poetry. I could therefore be seen as an enabler of this volume, and Ned Allen acknowledges me as an enabler and something of an inspiration in his Acknowledgements and Introduction. |
| Keywords: |
Dylan Thomas, science, physics, glands, hormones, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Alfred North Whitehead, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, Edwin Hubble, spacetime, evolution, sex, Ernest Starling, 'The Map of Love', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', Aldous Huxley, Ivan Pavlov, eugenics, Lawrence J. Henderson, homeostasis |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
1 |
| Start Page: |
91 |
| End Page: |
109 |