Dylan Thomas

Sir: Your correspondent Kenneth McKenney is unduly petulant about ‘Tribute to Dylan Thomas’. He deplores the ‘dry and almost schoolroom attitude’ of the speakers, excepting Denis Glover. As one of those speakers I should like, in a thoroughly schoolroom manner, to examine the implications of his letter.

Why can’t dead writers be left to the readers? All right, then, let us have no middlemen. Who will define and clarify for each generation the ‘formal engagement to gratify known habits of association’ which Wordsworth considers a poet makes with his audience? Critical assessments are made much more for those un- or semi-converted to an understanding of modern idiom than for the fans such as Mr McKenney. As every dramatist knows, public response to a play is determined as much by reviews as by the play itself. Is the answer no criticism? Rather, surely, responsible criticism.

‘Denis Glover did give us an honest and credible description of the man. . .’. Yes, because he had the good fortune to meet Thomas. His tribute, like Allen Curnow’s, was in part a personal one. But M.K. Joseph and myself could pay tribute only to the significance and stature of Thomas’s work.

‘Thomas was a man ripe with all the rich thoughts of a fertile lifetime. A man with an enormous lust for life – who drank too much gin . . .’. I envy Mr McKenney his certain knowledge of Thomas’s character and habits. However, as one who also mourned for the death of Thomas, I sympathise with his irascible championship of the man. Yet there is a point his warm glow of zeal has made him miss. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl has ‘rich thoughts’. They do not express them in adequate language. We honour Thomas the man because of Thomas the poet; otherwise that rum, racy little book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, would seem to us much superior to Deaths and Entrances. The enigma of genius does not reside in an artist’s personality but in his power to confront us through his medium with a mythical personality selected and fabricated from the former one – bricks out of straw, gold out of rubble.

page 140

‘Might we not just leave him that way – as a great and natural poet . . . ?’ There is nothing more unnatural than a great poet. ‘Let us be honest with ourselves.’

1954 (80)