In Our Time - Dylan Thomas

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953). He wrote some of his best poems before he was twenty in the first half of his short, remarkable life, and was prolific in the second half too with poems such as those set in London under the Blitz and reworkings of his childhood in Swansea, and his famous radio play Under Milk Wood (performed after his death). He was read widely and widely heard: with his reading tours in America and recordings of his works that sold in their hundreds of thousands after his death, he is credited with reviving the act of poetry as performance in the 20th century.WithNerys Williams Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at University College DublinJohn Goodby Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam UniversityAndLeo Mellor The Roma Gill Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Dylan Thomas, 1914 to 1953, wrote some of his best poems before he was 20 in the first half of his short, remarkable life that began in Wales and ended in a New York hospital. some but far from all.

He was prolific in the second half of his life too, including poems set in London under the blitz and re-workings of his childhood in Swansea and his famous radio play Under Milkwood. And with his reading to his American records of his works that sold in their hundreds of thousands after his death, he's credited with reviving the active poetry's performance in the 20th century.

When we had discussed Dylan Thomas, Arneros Williams, Associate Professor of Poetry in Poetics at University of College Dublin, Leo Meller, the Roma Guild Fellow in English at Murray Edward College University of Cambridge, and John Goodby, Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. John Goodby, what was Dylan Thomas' childhood like?

It was a happy childhood. He was born 27th of October 1914 in a middle-class suburb of Swansea, the Uplands. He was the second and last child of David John Thomas, DJ, as he was known, and Florence Williams, Flory, he'd had a sister, eight years older than him. The date's significant, though. He had a happy childhood, but it comes at the beginning of the First World War, it had just begun, and Dylan would be of the generation that was caught between

two wars, haunted by the First World War, dreading the second. His father didn't fight, but a lot of parents and friends and neighbours did. So there is that shadow of the interwar generation, but he grew up in a warm and happy-ish household. His father had 6,000 books, we're told, and he was given free reign. His father was a bit of a solitude figure. He had a temper. He was very sarcastic. He was a school teacher.

He was the English master at Swansea Grammar School. Flory was different. She was gregarious. But, yes, it was his father who apparently read Shakespeare, too, both his children when they were toddlers and children before they could even understand Shakespeare, both whose parents were Welsh speaking, but they didn't pass on Welsh to their children. They thought it would disadvantage them. They tried to iron out the Swansea accent as well.

Both of the children were sent to elocution lessons with a Miss Gwen Jones, who'd studied at the Central School for Speech and Drama. Later on he described himself as Lord Cutglass. And perhaps to offset the fact that his father was the English master at the school that he attended, Swansea Grammar, Dylan kind of cultivated a sort of tough image. He smoked. He was mischievous. What was he reading at that time? Who was influencing his developments of play?

He wrote, he published his poem very early. Who was he reading as a boy? He gives a vivid account of his child's reading in a questionnaire he did in 1950. And he says this. He says that he was first inspired to write by nursery rhymes, folk tales, border ballads, lines from hymns, Blake's Songs of Innocence,

and the Bible. He mentioned Shakespeare. And then he says that he was reading. reading around about the age of 10 or 12, I'd say, Sir Thomas Brown, De Quincey, Henry Newbolt, Marlowe, Chums, just a comic, The Imagesists, Poe, Keats, Anon, a mixed lot you see. So he's reading indiscriminately, as he said with his eyes hanging out on storks, bulldozing through his father's library of 6,000 books. And then around about the age of 13 or 14, he decides he wanted to make himself a modernist poet. So he starts focusing, and what he focuses on are the 17th century metaphysical poets like John Don, George Herbert, Milton, and the Jacobian playwrights, Webster, for example, Shakespeare, of course, as well. Hamlet was particularly important to him because it helped him dramatise the conflict he inevitably had with his father, who had literary ambitions but couldn't realize them and was a pretty

frustrated man. But he's also Ophay with a modernist, and he's reading Elliot, he's reading Joyce, he's reading Deach, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Americans as well. William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. He reads popular science, and that feeds into his notion of what poetry should be, that it should be about cosmic forces, as it were. Can we move on to Neris Williams for a second? How infused was Dylan Thomas with Welsh culture? He thought of as a Welsh poet, and yet he denied the Welsh language in a way.

Where are we with this one? Yes, I mean, if we think about it, it's very much a hyphenated identity, isn't it, Anglo-Welish? The interesting thing is that the census of 1921, tells us that the Thomas's identify as a Welsh-speaking household and the kids also Nancy and Dillon can understand and speak Welsh. Now, whether or not, you know, how fluid or how fluent they were is maybe a question. But certainly if you just even think about the culture, think about Dallan's name. He's named after the son of Ariandrod in the Mabinogion.

he's called Marlais after his great uncle Bard who grew up in Brechfer. So there is this naming, which is very much a Welsh context. I mean, I think we've also got to think about him as a Welsh writer in English. At that time, the focus would have been on the Bardic tradition and very much of the Aestadvorde. You might even think about the tensions also within how he presents himself. and what he knows of his own culture as well. Why do he occasionally, or more than occasionally, deny that he was Welsh-speaking?

Why did he hold to the English language and say, no, I'm not that, I'm this? I think it's a complexity about trying to be a modernist writer in Wales at that time and trying to move the debates about contemporary poetry, also operating in English as well. He's trying to make a name outside of Wales. He's trying to create a broadcast career as well. There were very few templates for Thomas. I mean, when you look at his writing, though, you can see the traces, the strains of Kanghanath.

That's not to say that he is trying to write in strict Welsh metre in English, but he's infused with hearing Welsh. And this is really, really important, I think, to think, to think about. Why did he keep denying it, then? I'm just thinking of the culture of the time. I'm thinking about, he talks about the August institution, which is the BBC, and presenters that have the Elgin marbles in their mouth. So I think that trying to fit into that culture is very difficult for somebody from a provincial town,

which hasn't got that template of an experimental Welsh writing in English. The Thomases spoke English at home. The parents spoke Welsh to each other, but they spoke English to their kids. but Dylan was sent off to stay with relatives, aunts and uncles in rural Carmarthenshire, during the summer holidays, and they would have spoken Welsh. So what I think Dylan had was an understanding up to a point of spoken Welsh. He probably had a few words and phrases in sentences himself.

Some of that leaks into the English language poetry as well. We have words like Parqueth, which he puns on in English for parched in order to make, it means reverend in Welsh, and he's talking about the parched worlds of Wales. the spiritual aridity of non-conformist church. So he uses Welsh words, but he's not fluent. And he doesn't like some of the ideological baggage, I think, that goes with the Welsh language at that time, which is quite an extreme form of nationalism.

Can I come into you, Leo, by his first collection, 18, including the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Now, he kept intensive notebooks from the age of 15 or 16 onwards, which he drew on for the rest of his life. but can you tell us about this first collection? It's an astounding first collection. I mean, it's a virtuosic one. It's published in December 1934,

and it's published then because he's won a prize in a newspaper called the Sunday Referee, and he's won the Poets Corner Prize, and part of the prize is for the publication of a volume, and the poem that had kind of got him there was The Force. He draws, he puts it together, very carefully and we can see this in the letters to Pamela Hanford Johnson, his girlfriend at the time, and he's using things from this fourth notebook and he writes some extra poems for it and he crafts this book and it's got amazing lyrics in it. The force that through the green fuse drives the

flower drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer and I am dumb to tell the crooked rose, my youth is bent by the same wintry fever. It brings together the human in the environment. It's a kind of pantheism, but it's a pantheism of interconnection, seeing the human in the environment and the environment and the human. And it's this, he talks to Pamela in the letters, about how it's called a process poetic, about processes, things moving, full of these verbs.

And it opens up this space. for 25 poems about seeing how this violent, intense identification of the self with the world and the world in the self works, and it sees forces that he tries to track in his poems. What's going on in that poem, perhaps more starkly than any other, is this understanding that the force that, as it were, drives the universe is creative and destructive simultaneously at the same time. The force that through the green spruce drives the flower, drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer. I am being created and destroyed simultaneously by this force.

So it's like a romantic pantheism, but it's souped up to the max. It's a modernist pantheism, if you like. But it's also, John, it's quite interesting. It's about the limits of language, isn't it? Because he says, but I am dumb. It's, I can't tell the world. The world will not understand this. I will recite it.

I will recount it, but I understand I am trapped in language. That's right, exactly. As he understands his oneness with the natural world, he also understands his separation from it, and that's one of these creative-destructive paradoxes. Can I go back to Leo for a moment? What are the broad themes that start to emerge at this very early stage in his career

with this very mature collection? I think there's a Joyceian wordplay, There's a wanting to play with words, do things with language, especially play with homophones and homonyms. So he plays with real, like a film reel and real as in the real world. The Gothic, because at the same time, you've got to remember he's writing short stories. So there's a got to be a gothic element coming in as well, a kind of hauntedness in many of these works. And there's a biomorphism, seeing this kind of animation of nature that's both glorified. and fecund and sexy, but also scary.

And that's all there in the 18 poems, and it grows and changes into 25. But there's also, and I think this is the strangest bit, there's a real interest in consciousness in actually what we might know and what we might not know. And in a poem like Before I Knocked, which is one of the great poems in 18 poems, that happens. And he tries to imagine life before conception. Before I knocked and flesh let enter With liquid hands tapped on the womb

I who was shapeless as the water That shaped the Jordan near my home Was brother to Manitha's daughter And sister to the fathering worm So this is expanding what poetry can do It can look at the natural world It can look at organic processes But also it can look forward to death

To entropy to dissolving but back to moments before consciousness. John Goodby, what was the response to these early published poems? The critic William Emson said that the response of the town by which he meant London was good, that it recognised with the publication of the Forcet Through the Green Fuse, that a new force had arrived in English poetry. And recognition then came pretty quickly. People realised that there was something that was an alternative

to the rather dry, cerebral, political poetry, of the Orden School and that Thomas had tapped into a sort of mythical substrate. He'd got a rhythmic, powerful poetry which reached back to the tradition of the Jacobian and Elizabethan poets, that it was a rich and sensual and biomorphic poetry, as Leo has said. I mean, one of the best ways of imagining this poetry

used to think of visual art, actually, the paintings of people like Miro and Arp and so on, rather than anything that had happened in English literature at that time. So people recognised that he was a new force to be reckoned with, and he followed that up quickly with his first collection, and then the second collection, which came out less than two years later. He was a coterie taste to begin with, because he was a new poet, very young, but in 1936, after the publication of 25 poems,

he was reviewed by Edith Sitwell in the Sunday Times. She gave it a rave review, and there was an ensuing debate, in the letters page lasted for several weeks about modern poetry and what it was allowed and not allowed to do in which Thomas was the centre of that debate and he gained a much broader platform from that. So his

reputation gradually grew and expanded through the 1930s. The impact was there, it was considerable right from the start. He featured in all of the major journals of the time Criterion edited by Elliot New Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson. He was included in about 10,

anthologies by 1938. So he arrived quite quickly. His short stories, which tend to be neglected, were also seen as something new. There's a sort of molten protoplasmic kind of energy to them. Neres, it wasn't long before people started to hear Dylan Thomas worked rather than read them. How did that happen? Well, I mean, to go back to his childhood, he, you know, a key friend of his Daniel Jones,

the composer, they set up a little radio station called War. Broadcasting Station at home. So he's always very interested in radio. He's very interested in not only the idea of orality, but our rality, what we listen to, what we hear to. Of course, he won then the competition in 1932. This was recorded, and unfortunately the broadcasters lost, the Romantic Isle.

But then goes on then to 1938. He performs his own work in the modern muse. This is a key moment for him with W.H. Orden and Louis MacNeice. But how did it bond with the public? Or how it bonded with the public, certainly towards the later point of his life, was the fact that he was the first Cadman record to be produced by Barbara Holdridge and Marion Mantel. So this is how he connected, which sold 400,000 copies. But certainly his work at the BBC was really important,

but also the way in which she read as well. He also worked as an important to note that he worked as an actor as well at the BBC. and that was a kind of apprenticeship that he'd had at the little theatre in Swansea. All these factors are coming together in his work, not only he's interested in media, but also the fact that he's interested in the idea of the oral, the performative, that he's an actor who can actually manage it.

If I can, I mean, I've got a really nice citation here from Richard Burton. Auden read in the sing-song, toneless, colourless way, the most poets have. I remember Yates, Elliot McLeish, who read the most evocative poem with such monotony as to stand in the brain. Only Dylan could read his own stuff. Leo Mello, what, if anything, did surrealism, surrealism mean to Dylan Thomas?

It meant an enormous amount because you've got to try and imagine how surrealism came as this kind of galvanic shock to British culture in the late 1930s. And I think one of the mistakes people have made and spilled a lot of ink over is trying to think was he or was he not a surrealist. And it's much better to try and think about surrealism as a kind of a source, not a doctrine, a template, not actually just a movement that you have to be in or out of. And with Thomas, the main thing is he reads from really early on from 1930, a magazine called Transition. And this is filled with surrealist writers and art from across Europe, but he introduces them to the anglophone world.

And surrealism is definitely there in some early poems as a kind of a thing to use. He talks about a scythe of hair or a turtle in a hearse. This is in an early poem called When Like a Running Grave. And he writes about splitting the long eye open in Eye in My Intricate Image, which is a reference to Bunwell's film. But he denies it's an influence on him

and he does it for, I think, two big reasons. He does it because he's trying to convince a publisher that he's not one of these crazy experimental poets. He's going to be a solid bet. So he says he doesn't know anything about Surrealism. It's a very tongue-in-cheek letter, and a lot of it's obviously disprovable. But more interestingly, he doesn't want to be known as a surrealist

because he's not a signer of manifestos or a joiner up to groupings. He wants to use surrealism and have a very distinct path. But we see what he does when he, in 1936, there's a big international surrealist exhibition in London. So all the art comes, Dali does a lecture in a diving suit, and Dylan's there. But he doesn't initially read poetry. He goes around handing out teacups filled with boiled string, asking everyone if they'd like it, weak or strong. So he does it as a performance,

and I think this comes back to Nevis's point about him being an actor. John Goodby, can you tell us about Dylan Thomas's war poetry? He's one of the very few people who ran towards London rather than away from it when the bombing started. Why did he do that? And how did this compare with the poetry of the Great War before it? Poetry, the First World War, was a kind of static poetry.

It's poetry of the Western Front, Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Rosenberg and so on, and it was a soldiers' poetry. So it was about the suffering in the trenches. In the Second World War, much more mobile war, Britain was an isolated island, and the front line was basically the air war, the bombing of the cities. So civilians became, as it were, the soldiers in the trenches.

There were more casualties in the first couple of years of the Second World War in Britain among civilians, and there were among armed forces. So how do you register that? Well, as you say, Dylan Thomas stayed in England. He didn't go off to America like Orden. He was acknowledged as the leader of the new generation of poets in the 1940s, the new apocalypse poets they called themselves.

They all looked up to Dylan. And he filled the gap. You know, he had a role to play and he fulfilled it. And he became the elegist, the great elogist, of the civilian blitz, bearing witnesses, as it were, to the civilian dead. So what sort of poetry did he, for people who don't know anything much about, in all poetry. Can you give them a clue as to what sort of poetry was writing at that time?

He writes when the bombs are falling, basically. It's out of a sense of moral outrage. The alleges that he's writing, are curious ones, like the first of the three great ones, is among those killed in the dawn raid was a man aged 100, and he's actually writing about something which is quite

peculiar, a centenarian being killed in a bombing raid in Hull. When the morning was waking over the war, he put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, the lock, yawned loose and a blast blew them wide. He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone and the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.

And he imagines at the end of that poem a hundred stalks perching on the sun's right hand, an image of regeneration, a births, as it were, one for each year of the centenarians age, replacing him as he dies in that raid. In what other ways did Dylan Thomas respond to the war creatively? Well, certainly in terms of his work, documentary work, with Strand films, it had an impact on his writing, I would suggest, of Undermilk Wood. In thinking about the filmic image and the idea of narration and perspective is really key, I think, in terms of intersection of media.

I think one of the strange things, and John's mentioned bombing, one of the things that bombing did, it made surrealism, which had previously looked like, an artistic experiment. It made surrealism into a kind of realism in the strange tabloes you got after bombing raids. And Thomas responded to this, this idea that you have this collage of strange, violent things thrown together. But now, rather than just being in the life of the mind, it was the city in front of him. There's a quote, actually, Leo, from a letter of his, this is the first raid in London at the beginning of the Blitz. And he says this, the Hyde Park guns were booming, guns on the top of selfridges. a plane brought down and Tottencourt Road. White-faced taxes still trembling through the streets, though,

and buses going, and even people being shaved. And that's a surreal image, the white-faced taxes trembling through the streets, people having a shave while the bombs are dropping. In what way was the war then deeply affecting his writing? Did he find resources from the wall that he hadn't used before? Well, I think it becomes, I think this is, with Nowes mentioning the films,

it becomes a different kind of public voice. And I think a poem such as ceremony after a fire raid, which is one of the ones he writes in the later period in 44, it's this idea of a public performance of remembrance. And it does sound, it sounds like a poem, but also it sounds like a piece of music. And Thomas said himself, the last bit should be like music.

And I'll just read the first, the opening. Myself, the grievers, grieve. among the street burned to tireless death, a child of a few hours, with its kneading mouth charred on the black breast of the grave, the mother dug, and its arms full of fires. And it's this sympathy for the child victim, for the civilian victim, that goes back to the Spanish Civil War, goes right through his wartime poems,

and then goes onwards into the 50s with all his fears about nuclear warfare. And so that, if we want to think of what Thomas is testifying to about the historical moment, it's this fear, the fear of annihilation. I think that's, yeah, that's very, very true. He becomes a more celebratory poet during the Second World War, but he's also, as it were, guilty and regretful about the fact that he's writing films for the Ministry of Information,

that he's producing propaganda. and the tension... Making warm bodies cold. Exactly, yeah. You know, he doesn't want to fight. He doesn't even want to work in a munitions factory. He wants as little to do with the war as possible. He says, for one point, I will declare myself a neutral state or join up as a tank.

But there's a tension in the poetry. So there is a kind of celebratory force in the ceremony after a fire raid, which Leo's just read from. And at the end of that poem, there's a kind of tidal wave coming through an amnambority. neotic tsunami of births to douse the blitzfires, and it's a positive ending. And then later, a year later, he writes another poem about the death of a child, a refusal to mourn the death by fire of a child in London. And it's much darker. And it's as though he's trying to make amends for, in some ways, for the positivity of that poem,

and for the film scripts. But it's important to also know that as he writes, it's got the filmic eye, it's got the movement of the camera, the into, the over, the through, the way that there's this fluid motion through the images is, I think, coming from the fact he's been working non-stop in films, trying to earn money. Because that's the other thing we have to remember. He was poor. He never had a private income, didn't go to university.

He is taking on... He was always broke. He's always broke, taking on lots of different kinds of jobs and doing things with them. But he always needs money. So the film work is really important because it keeps him alive. and keeps his growing family alive, but it gives him a language and a way of seeing.

Ineris Williams, how did Undermilkwood come about and how did it become such a success? You can think of Under Milkwood as a life's work to some degree because he starts mentioning it in 1932 to 33 with Bert Trick, his socialist friend in Swansea. But the key moment is when he writes, is commissioned by the BBC for quite early one morning. And we see in quite early one morning in 1944,

kernels of speech acts and different forms of writing that we get in Undermogwood. If you just think some of the characters that appear, they're Captain Tiny Evans, Reverend Thomas Evans, which are Captain Cat and Reverend Delai Jenkins. We've got a Mavanoe Price. We've even got the lines from Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing room floor, and before you let the sun in, mind he wants you.

wipes his shoes. So you can really see how he is, you know, he's moving on. This is what happens with Thomas a lot, and I think it's one thing we haven't addressed, is how he reuses, recycles material from economic necessity

because he's trying to make a living. He's trying to fill these deadlines. Same is true with the Charles Christmas in Wales and the evolution of that. But eventually then, it ends up in 1950 then, and it goes through different formations you've got the town that was mad

is one title, then you've got the Laregib is used as another title, but then you've got the intervention I suppose of Douglas Cleverden who says, you know, don't push too much with this play, we're looking for a sound scape, we're looking for voices, we're not just looking for plot. Douglas Cleverden was the producer.

He was the producer, very famous producer in the BBC at that time. He did some great things, yes. And actually he worked very hard on this with Thomas. Of course he did, yes. He put up his own own income against, as a risk, against this actual, the deadline for the finished script. And of course, the script was not completely finished. We've got 11 different versions of Undermakwood.

It was also performed, and this is going back to the idea of theatre, it was performed as part of the Poets Theatre in Harvard as well, which is a really formative space for thinking about the verse. So what Thomas is doing with this work, he's using it as theatre, but he's also using it as broadcast material and this is the kind of complexity about the definitive addition of end milk wood as well Leo what was the reaction to

Thomas but let's stick to milkwood for a for a while just get a grip on that what was your reaction to under milkwood I think it it was seen as a really singular work of what you could do with radio if you had a kind of joycean idea of 24 hours but you would

have multiple characters woven together and you would have both kinds of speech that could be related to the realistic, but kinds of speech which were obviously performances. But I think Neris knows more about Underwork Milkwood than I do. Having a look at the listening reports, what's interesting, that one of Thomas's most critically acclaimed broadcast, which is Return Journey to Swansea,

which he was produced by P.H. Burton. gets... Ah, that's Richard Burton's... Yes, Richard Burton's... Yes, absolutely. And Peter Burton would have discussed Under Milkwood as well in his various forms with Thomas.

That gets a rating of 60. Under Milkwood gets a rating of 80 with the listening reports. And one thing that's interesting about it, we haven't, you know, maybe thought about his populism here is that listeners... In the report it says,

listeners who dislike modern poetry discovered for the first time, the poetry could be a joyful surprise, priors. It also wins, of course, the pre-Italia as well for Cleverdon. I think one of the things about under milk wood is the time that it emerged. Nerey said it was a life work and there are reports, but twig of having an idea for the day in the life of Italian as early as 1932. Why does it emerge in the 1950s, the early 1950s?

Well, it's the golden age of radio and we can place Undermilk Wood somewhere between, if you like, a soap opera like the arthur, archers which started around about that time. And the Goon Show, it's a kind of blend of those two kind of genres of radio that are emerging at that time. It draws on both of them. I mean, the initial conception of it, as Neri said, was for something called the town that was mad, it was going to be a realist drama in which Captain Cat goes to Cardiff. He's in court to try and defend the village against the Welsh government, which wants to surround it with a kind of ring of barbed wire to keep the madness of the town away from the rest of the world.

And when Captain Cat finds out what the rest of the world is like, he says, put that ring of barbed wire around us because you're the mad ones and we're the same ones. But that was too realistic a sort of concept. So he chucked it away and they chucked it away, yeah. One thing we could say, Melvin, is the way that Thomas understood the nature of radio. He makes the main narrator, the main consciousness, apart from the first voice that is Captain Cat, who is a blind,

and who hears everything. So he focuses and channels for the listener what is going on around him in the town. and Thomas had an innate understanding of the oral, as there is said. If I can maybe in a letter to Princess Ketani, he says, out of it came the idea that I write a piece of play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness, out of the town I live in, and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of movement and varieties of moods. So that at many levels, through sight and speech, description and, dialogue, evocation and parody, you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it.

The subtitle of Underbilt Wood is a play for voices. It's not a play. And people misunderstand this quite often, I think, when they try to do stage versions or visual versions, that's great, but it's written four voices. And for sound effects, it's meant to happen inside your head. There was something distinctive about the way he, Donald Thomas, adapted to the new media. We know that as a child he'd been interested in comics and horror comics, and he was a reporter at school. He edited the school magazine and so he threw himself about and enjoyed being involved in every aspect of that.

This seems to have helped him a lot in the new media. Instead of holding it with a pair of pincers in disdain, he leapt into it. Yeah, I think that's one of the characteristic things about Dylan Thomas, you know, as compared with his contemporaries, that he explored every media, not just literary media, so poems, short stories, novel, a radio drama and so on, but he went into radio. He'd been a journalist, let's remember, between the ages of 16 and 17, wasn't terribly good at it,

but he knew how newspapers worked to some extent. Then it was radio, then it was film, he was writing scripts in the war years, of course, but he'd been an avid filmgoer all through his life. He was much more thrilled meeting Chaplin when he went to America than he was meeting any American poets. And then in the latter years of his life, he actually made two TV broadcasts. He helped to found the LP industry,

the spoken word LP industry in America when he did the recordings for Cadmond. I think he embraced those possibilities of mass audiences because he had a common touch. He didn't mind, as it were, putting his stuff out to the masses. He didn't despise them. He wasn't an ivory tower poet. Why do you think he was a,

embraced so much by the stars of the media, people like Bob Dylan did he want, named themselves out to him, the Beatles had him on their jacket, and so on and so forth. Where did that all come from? Well, he lived a rock star life, I suppose. I mean, getting drunk all the time and being at big parties. Let's put it like this. I think rock stars think he led a rock star life. If you actually look at what Dylan Thomas did, you see 1,000 pages of letters,

you see 500 pages of film scripts, you see 200 pages of film scripts, you see 200 pages of poetry. You see 300 pages of short stories and fiction. This is a man who worked relentlessly. He knew how to socialise, obviously, but he didn't spend most of his time doing that, otherwise he wouldn't have produced what he did. But the way that he ended,

in what seems to be a kind of explosion of excess in New York City in 1953, and at an early age at 39, appeals to the way that rock stars and film stars like to think of themselves as misunderstood geniuses, as it were. You can also think of the outer stage. cider as well. There's somebody who doesn't quite

fit into an institution, doesn't quite fit into the idea of possibly what people might think of the poet. But I'm just thinking of late as well that Paul McCartney has come out and actually said that Ander McWood was a big influence on the writing of Penny Lane. I think the fact that he was a craftsman

and yet had this public image is really interesting. I think the poem, in my craft or southern art, is a good one to think about as a a way of how he thought about what he was doing and why it mattered, he could both have a persona. He was an actor, he could play a persona,

but he could also know he was a craftsman. Was there a sense in his career that the academics, the establishment, looked down on him and considered him to be a mere populizer? That happened in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, I'd say. For about 20 years after his death, his popular reputation and his academic reputation were more or less the same, at the same fairly high level.

But in the 1970s, late 70s and the 80s, as in a lot of other areas of British life conservatism kicked in, and Thomas was seen as a kind of dead end and excessive, colourful flare-up, not somebody to imitate. So academia went down that path of ignoring him, really, and excluding him from the histories. He's being rehabilitated now, but gradually, I'd say.

I think there's a kind of... The most interesting recent criticism has been, as Nairus mentioned earlier, trying to think about what a Welsh literature in English might look like and what an Anglo-Welish literature might look like. And Dylan gets us into a very particular world of other poets such as Lynette Roberts, Keidrich Rees, and he offers an amazing contrast to a poet such as R.S. Thomas, who is great Welsh poet in English, but takes such a different direction. in what he thinks poetry should be and how it should be written.

So what do you conclude from then? That any history of 20th century British poetry probably has Dylan Thomas fairly slap bang in the centre. He's the kind of, as it were, sparring partner with W.H. Orden. They tend to be set up as polar opposites, but actually they come out of the same sense of crisis of apocalypse, really, at the beginning of the 1930s, of a generation thinking, our older brothers fought and were killed in the first world war,

we are being lined up as cannon fodder for a second world war. Fascism is on the rise in Europe and so on. Orden and Thomas come out of that same fear, but they're useful opposites and they tend to be polarised. But I don't think that is where Thomas should be. He comes up with something different to Orden. He comes up with the poetry of the body, of language, which focuses on language.

and the body in nature, the body as part of nature. So I think eco-criticism, thinking about a more ecologically-minded way of thinking about literature, can do and has done a lot with him. Yeah, I mean, he's an outsider, as Neres says as well. And one of the things to Thomas' eternal credit is that in 1952, he reviewed a novel by Amos Tutuola, the Palm Wine Drinkard, a Nigerian novelist. And he said, this is a marvellous book. And according to Wallach Yinka, no obfell.

prize winner, Nigerian writer also in the 1970s. This actually put West African literature on the map. Thomas, writing as an outsider, recognised the outsider qualities of this West African novel and helped to publicise the fact that there was a whole school of post-colonial writing emerging in West Africa. I think also it's really important to think of him as an international figure on a poetic stage. If you think about how he was embraced by American poets, I'm thinking about Alan Ginsberg, thinking about Sylvia Plath, but also his impact on this idea of the spoken word performance. Where does poetry live?

Is poetry in between covers of a book? You can see his ideas being grappled with the beatnecks, for example, if you think about the movement from the academy out into the street. But also the kind of existential question of what is poetry, what's its point? Where does it fit into the public sphere? how does it engage with its audience? You know, he really did think about that idea of orality

in terms of the speech but also the oral in terms of the ear, in terms of listening audience as well. We haven't spoken so far in this discussion about your paekness of some of his work. It's sakes a lot of rereading. It rewards a lot of rereading would be the other way to see it. Yeah, I mean, Dylan Thomas said, you know, because early critics like Spender said Thomas's stuff is just turned on like a tap,

and they saw it as formless regurgitation. He said, you know, it is anything but that. And if you look closely at the poetry, it's very strictly organised. And I think this is one of the things that any reasonable examination of those difficult poems brings out, that it's incredibly disciplined. The syllable counts are regular. There is a rhyme scheme usually, an off-rhyme scheme. He knows what he's doing

and that draws you in It makes you think This is somebody who knows where he's at He must be trying to tell us something And Thomas himself says I don't write these poems That were to be absorbed or sucked in through the pause You know there is a meaning there

The reader might have to work for it But you know There's nothing wrong in that You know I give you a role as reader Not just spoon feed you a sense As a lot of poetry does And he makes the distinction several times through his life

two different kinds of poetry, one that works from words and one that works towards words. And he says, my poetry works from words. I get a kind of nest of phrases of words that interest me that have a kind of dynamism between them,

that have a spark, and I see where that takes me. Whereas a lot of poets, they have an idea and then they look for the words that will express that idea. I think one poem that really gives us this sense is once it was of the colour of saying,

which is still a fairly early poem, but you really get that density in the language. So I'm just going to quote the last four lines of it. The shade of their trees was a word of many shades and a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark. Now my saying shall be my undoing, and every stone I wind off like a reel. So this sense, I think, of the materiality of language,

its opacity, but also the colour. of saying that also has a Welsh inflection, if I can add that, in terms of thinking about Ljouya, which is an expression that's used for Welsh language performances, in terms of you colour, your language, you emphasise and shade certain forms of performances as well. Thank you all very much. That was terrific.

Thanks to Euneris Williams, John Goodby, and Leo Miller, and our studio engineer, Sue Mayo. Next week, the astonishing Cambodia, temple of Angol Watt, said to be the largest religious structure on earth. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Thank you very much for that.

Now, could we go on and do more than we can turn into a magnificent podcast? That was very good. Yeah, well, that's fun. Thank you, Melvin. I mean, I would like to go on to what Neris was saying about once it was the colour of saying, just to illustrate Dylan Thomas's use of language, which is difficult, as you say. So he's basically giving you the view from the window where he's writing his poems. But look at the way the language is working there.

First of all, there's this image of his table being soaked, as it were, with ink. So there's a marine imagery being introduced. And then we get to this capsized field, which you can see through the window. And how is it capsized? It's capsized because it's on a hill, so it's tilting like a sinking ship. It's capsized because it's at a distance and it's small. And there's even a pun there on false cap, you know, because he's talking about paper and he's talking about writing.

He's always trying to get maximum meaning into phrases and into single words. So although the poem is about giving up the colour of saying, you know, once it was the kind of saying and now I'm going to do something different, it's actually packed with colour. And ironically, the later poetry is more colourful than the early poetry. if we're thinking about language and where things go, I mean, we have this terrible ghostly shadows of what he was about to do if he hadn't died.

Ah, yes, I mean, that's not that. And I'm... Have you any notion of it? Oh, well, there are two. There are two big ones, and the first is the opera he was meant to do with Stravinsky. And the money he was getting from the Undermilkwood readings in New York

was going to fund him being in California for the winter of 53. and we have the letters between him and Stravinsky, and we have a few ideas about what he's going to write as a libretto for the opera. And it was going to be, it was about a nuclear war. After a nuclear war, there was going to be a boy and a girl in a cave. And this is this interest in childhood again, and child victims, and both innocence, and we can go back to Thurn Hill, but also potentiality.

And they're hiding in this cave after a nuclear war, and they're trying to describe to each other the loss. world that's gone now, turned to ash. And they're doing it through the remaking of language. And Thomas just says in a letter, The boy tries to explain what a tree was. Tries to find a language for what a tree was. Now it's all gone.

I mean, this post-nuclear, post-acocalypse thing is very big in late Thomas. He's scared by the war. I mean, Vernon Watkins said it was a moral shock from which he never recovered. And he incorporates allusions to the Holocaust in a refusal to mourn. The first draft of that poem does not have the word Zion and synagogue in it. And having seen what, you know, the film reels of what happened at Auschwitz and so on in early 1945, he puts those illusions in, referring to the Holocaust. But then along comes the Cold War.

And his whole later projects in poetry, just as in the opera, as you say, is something called in-country heaven, which is about the extinguishing of the earth in a nuclear holocaust. It's about people in country heaven remembering the lives they had in this extinguished world, the earth. I'll read a tiny bit of what he proposed to it. He said, his world's drop dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explode, murders itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poison burst. Insanity has blown it rotten and no creatures at all.

This is trauma, and it's what's so interesting is the arc that goes from, the fears in the Spanish Civil War, these proleptic fears, the Blitz and his writing of the Blitz, to these terrible fears that become global fears by the time of in-country heaven and the poems he's writing to try and put together in a sequence there. Yeah, one of those poems is poem on his birthday. He had a whole series of birthday poems, and this was the last one he wrote. It was his 35th birthday, and he refers in that poem to himself. So he's imagining this rocketed intercontinental.

ballistic missile doom of the earth and allusions to that kind of nuclear apocalypse crop up in these poems which seem to be fairly rural but actually about destruction. Because this is what so weird at the same time

he's also writing these extraordinarily pastoral poems and I suppose Fern Hill being the most famous but he's over St John's Hill he's looking at the landscape especially the landscape around Larn

or in the white giant's thigh. He's looking at nature, but he's seeing the menace that surrounds it. Well, the hawk there has a viparish fuse that hangs looped with flames under the brand wing. I mean, it's like a bomber, isn't it? It's a fighter bomber as well as a hawk. In Fern Hill, he alludes to time taking him up

by the shadow of his hand to the loft. And what we think of there is, yes, this is about the child losing that early innocence, but also the shades burnt onto the ruins of buildings at Hiroshima by people vaporised in the atomic blast. It's also a Welsh poem. I mean, it's going back to his childhood to going into rural Wales. I was thinking about his legacy to other poets and a subsequent generation.

So if you think about the new poetry and you think about Al-Alvarez and you think about how poets are grappling with Holocaust, also the atomic, war. I'm thinking specifically here of Sylvia Plath and Plath would have heard Thomas's Cadman Records as a student but also would have been

mourning Thomas Thomas' death because she was working at Mademoiselle magazine at that time. So we cannot really look at 20th century poetry without looking at Thomas as this kind of linchpin between the modernist and also the contemporary. And not just

in English because you've got people like Paul Salan, if we're thinking about the aftermath of Second World War, Salan is very affected by Thomas. Salan, who is a Romanian Jewish writer writing in German, who's commonly agreed to be perhaps the greatest European poet of the

last 60 or 70 years, gets a lot of his organic imagery, a lot of his alchemical imagery from the early poems of Dylan Thomas. And if you hop across the Atlantic then to America, Nairus has mentioned Ginsburg. But look at the early

surreal work of Frank O'Hara, one of the great voices of the New York School of the 1960s. He didn't want to go to a Thomas reading in 1952, I think, because he didn't want to be covered in what he said was Welsh spit if he sat in the first row or two. But his own poetry is a kind of uptake of that surrealism that Leo was mentioning in Thomas' early poetry. And he told John Ashbury, the other great New York school poet, that Thomas was one of the half a dozen poets that he really rated, that he'd learnt from. Well, there we are. That's been a wonderful round of. Thank you all very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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