Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas

Abstract

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 multichannel 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 about the ongoing admissibility into the roll-call of 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 39 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