B 0 0 K S
81
The demand for anthologies is so ferocious at present, or publishers
think it is-the truth is that we are passing through a deadly and vacant
period, with an absence of good new manuscripts to print-that when no
general anthology is available for the presses, they anthologize a single
man. Dylan Thomas' new book is a selection by the publisher: a few
poems from his first two English books (weirdly omitting
Light breaks
where no sun shines, The hand that signed the paper felled a city, I have
longed to move away,
etc.), many from
The Map of Love
and the new
Deaths and Entrances,
some prose; it overlaps both his earlier New
Directions books and, like all the volumes reviewed here, costs too much.
But Thomas is one of the three best poets writing in England and anyone
who pretends to interest in these matters will need both his book and
Lowell's. I tried to describe his verse some years ago
(Kenyon Review,
Autumn 1940) and want at present to make only one or two points.
About his development. Any poet
may
turn out an opsimath like
Yeats, it happens at least once a century, but in general it should be
possible for a critic to say with confidence from a poet's first good book
what sort of development, if any, is to be expected thereafter. By develop–
ment we mean a movement from one kind of thing to another (getting
better at the same thing is called improvement). The law is this: poets,
even fine ones, do not develop. Then you have the exceptions. Thomas
began very young at a high level. What made it improbable that he
would move from the kind of poem he was writing to another kind is
that he was incapable of handling a subject without dissolving it into his
own obsessions and imagery until the subject disappeared. He is still
more or less incapable of this . Instead of comparing him to Shakespeare
and cooing over his development, his English admirers should thank
heaven and his character that he has continued to write
extremely well,
without undue self-imitation, and with a mildly expanding range of
subject. Some of his finest poems are recent, for example
Holy Spring.
A poem like
Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged
One Hundred,
cited as an instance of his new particularity, becomes at
once in fact a Thomas dream.
This poem is full of locks and keys. John L. Sweeney, in an interest–
ing preface to this book, speaks of "regeneration." The concept is not
clear to me, but something similar is clear: that Thomas' poems are
about
breaking Loose.
There is a
lock
(and a congeries of related symbols
for repression). Infrequently a
key
is available, but on the whole one has
to
break
the lock (congeries of expressions for these also). This action
takes place at dawn, the poems are full of
waking.
Difficulty after dif–
ficulty disappears once this theme is grasped. A spiritual movement for–
ward, sometimes represented as flight, toward
light
or freedom. The
intensity and freshness of Thomas' variations on the theme are a con–
tinuing source of delight.
