FruitFly

Ted Hughes on Dylan Thomas

I was rummaging around in some of my old notebooks and came across a passage I had copied from an essay Ted Hughes had written on Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas is my original poetic obsession, pre-dating even Plath. I read him over and over again, understanding very little. Those poems that I did understand I didn’t particularly like; they seemed to miss the point, a point his more enigmatic and ineffably greater pieces seemed to converge upon. Ted Hughe’s observation about Thomas’ poetry is the single greatest critical insight I know of regarding his work. It reclaims Thomas from those who criticised him for lack of a social dimension and the examination of ideas, which was characteristic of his contemporary Auden, and those who claim he bombastically magnified the trivial and everyday. The second criticism is valid when applied to those poems that were topical, those that I understood. But his true greatness lay in a patient, lapidary attempt to use language in an attempt to see. He worked very, very slowly, with great concentration, sometimes only producing one line, or even half a line, per day. When I read this quote by Hughes on Thomas, it instantly clarified the grounds of my fascination with poems such as the sonnet sequence Altarwise by Owlight. Read, and be illumined! Or not.

“It was a vision of the total creation. He had no comments or interpretations or philosophisings to add to it. His poetry was exclusively an attempt to present it. Each poem is an attempt to sign up the whole heavenly vision, from one point of vantage or other, in a static constellation of verbal prisms. It is this fixed intent, and not a rhetorical inflation of ordinary ideas, that gives his language it’s exaltation and reach.”