Dylan Thomas Was a Reincarnated Druid, Part 1

The Craft and Druid Art of Dylan Thomas

Jan 16, 2025

I am currently working on an essay on Dylan Thomas, one of the first poets to really captivate me long, long ago. Here is the first section.

The publication of Dylan Thomas’s 18 Poems in December 1934 erupted in the British Isles like a chthonic upheaval of Welsh magical power the likes of which had probably not been seen since the days of Owain Glyndŵr. Reviewing the slim volume in The Listener, the poet Edwin Muir had nothing but praise for the young man. “The first thing that strikes one about Dylan Thomas’s poetry,” he wrote, “is its purely poetic force: there is nothing that could be taken for prose: his thought seems to transmute itself naturally and continuously into imagery.”[1] At the time of publication, Thomas had just turned twenty. Most of the poems in the volume were written when he was just nineteen.

His was certainly a precocious talent and the only one of his contemporaries with whom his precociousness might be compared is the surrealist poet and translator David Gascoyne, just two years younger than Thomas. Indeed, the surrealism then spreading throughout the world between the wars influenced Thomas as well and, as a result, his verse often can strike one as obscure. To be sure, he was still a young man and he still had not realized the extent of his poetic powers and, like any young man of exemplary artistic gifts, was not immune from moments of imaginative and linguistic excess driven by the poetic furor that so possessed him. Nevertheless, Thomas chafed at the charges of obscurity:

“I think I do know what some of the main faults of my writing are: immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddleheadedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads too often to incoherence. But every line is meant to be understood; and the reader is meant to understand every poem by thinking and feeling about it, and not by sucking it through his pores, or whatever he is meant to do with surrealist writing”.[2]

When his second volume, Twenty-Five Poems, appeared in 1936 his star rose even further, in no small part on the wings of Dame Edith Sitwell’s praise in the Sunday Times. “I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation,” she gushes, “who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement,” describing his use of imagery as possessing “a poignant and moving beauty.”[3] Despite this encouragement, Thomas’s poetic output was reduced to almost a dribble in the years to follow. Surprisingly, when surveying the work collected in Thomas’s literary executor Daniel Jones’s chronologically-arranged The Poems of Dylan Thomas, it is somewhat astounding to discover that all but twenty-seven of the one-hundred-sixty-three poems of the collection were written before his twenty-fifth birthday, before he had reached the fullest realization of his poetic powers.

But those poetic powers were always in evidence, due in no small part to the incantatory cadences of his verse and the startling array of his imagery, drawing on nature and biblical iconography, folklore and fairy-tale, dream-vision the landscapes of Wales, but fusing them in a manner similar to a supercollider’s creation of new elements by throwing extant elements toward one other at great speed, the experience of which is exhilarating, if not intoxicating, for the reader. This is most certainly the gift that so astonished his first readers and contributed to his meteoric rise (his tragic fall was almost entirely self-inflicted). In addition to that, there was his voice.

Dylan Thomas, probably more than any other poet of the modern era, was (and I am avoiding the historical present tense intentionally) a poet of the voice as much as he was a poet of the page. This is not so much an issue of performance, as is almost always the case is so-called “spoken word” poetry that habitually relies on the gesticulations and bravado of performance to compensate for the meager literary or poetic force of the words spoken. Rather, with Thomas the voice was not a persona but an expression of a reality far deeper than that of his fragile, all too human personality. This was evident even when he was teenager.

When Thomas was seventeen, he talked about his poetry with Thomas Taig, who ran the Little Theater and was an English lecturer at University College, Swansea. Taig recommended the young man speak to Bert Trick, a local shopkeeper and poet. Trick, who became something of an early mentor to Thomas, wrote of his first meeting with the young poet:

“I invited him into the sitting room and we sat and discussed all sorts of things, sizing each other up, and after an hour or so, I asked. ‘Would you like now that I read your poems?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, poems shouldn’t be read; they should be spoken.’ Whereupon, he pulled a rolled-up blue school exercise book out of his pocket, sat back in the easy chair, with his leg over one arm, and in an arresting voice started to read some of the early poems. I was astonished. It was clear that here was a poet singing in a new voice. After he had read three poems and he had asked me what I thought of them, we discussed them. I was so impressed that I wanted Nell, my wife, to meet him so I went into the next room on grounds of fetching coffee and told Nell, ‘I’ve found a genius. You must come and hear this.’ And she, too, immediately fell under the spell of the words and the voice.’”[4]

This was to be a feature of the being of Dylan Thomas throughout his life. Years later, in his trips to read to audiences in America, the quality of his voice married to his words (and the words of others, as he would often read the works of other poets as well) worked its magic. As Ferris relates of the American tours, “People frequently said that Thomas’s way of reading made them understand the poems for the first time; but it may be that under the influence of his voice, the literal meaning of a poem became irrelevant. Some women found the voice aphrodisiac.”[5] This is all the more startling, given that Thomas, standing at five foot six, blowsy, and looking like a rumpled Harpo Marx, unlike his friend and great reciter of Thomas’s poetry, the great actor Richard Burton, did not have an appearance to match the voice. Thomas’s poetry filtered through his voice possessed a quality in every way a form of spell-casting, almost uncanny it is effects.

Thomas’s poetry is undeniably Welsh, undeniably Celtic, with its atmosphere of melancholy, the ways in which nature (and especially birds) communicates ontological and spiritual truths, and its mastery of melopoeia, the art of forming a poem’s music. His melopoeia is characterized by the astounding array of devices he employs, such as rhythm, rhyme (including internal rhyme and slant-rhyme) assonance, consonance, alliteration, and a propensity for syllabic verse over traditional English and Continental forms of making poems, though he used them as well. For these reasons (and others), Kathleen Raine rightfully places Thomas, along with his fellow Welshman and poet Vernon Watkins, in the “bardic tradition” of poetry; for the bardic tradition is a tradition that opens the way between the worlds. As Raine writes, “The evocation of the ‘other’ mind by incantatory rhythms is as old as mankind; and whatever the reason may be, the gift of lyrical and incantatory speech seems at all times to accompany ‘inspired’ utterance and to those who know how to tap the springs.”[6] Thomas clearly possessed such a gift, but it seems to be one with which he was born and did not necessarily acquire through education and study (he was an unimpressive student and denied admission to college).

The Celtic element of Thomas’s verse cannot be overstated. He was writing, after all, in the mighty wake of the Celtic Twilight in Ireland, when poets such as William Butler Yeats and A. E. (George William Russell) excavated the mythic and symbolic languages of ancient Ireland in the service of a modern, even nationalistic poetry (certainly to distinguish themselves from English literature) and the very Welshness of Thomas’s poetry doubtless owes a debt to their trailblazing. Yeats and Russell were attempting to recapture of a modern poetics of the Celtic wild, a poetics with a clear allegiance to realms of the spirit and the landscape. Writing in the late-1910s, Sri Aurobindo, educated at Cambridge and deeply immersed in English Romanticism, described the magic of the Celtic revival: “A distinct spiritual turn, the straining toward a deeper, more potent, supra-intellectual and supravital vision of things is its innermost secret of creative power.” Much the same—and even more—could be said for the poetry of Dylan Thomas.[7]

Over my over thirty-plus years’ engagement with Thomas’s poetry, he has more and more impressed me as an almost atavistic genius: as if he were an ancient druid who asked to be sent back to Wales from the Otherworld, only to find himself enmeshed in the madness of modernity in a culture that no longer holds poets in esteem. Indeed, it would not be too wild a wager to surmise that Thomas’s alcoholism was a sad last refuge for a reincarnated druid plunged into a world antagonistic to the Otherworld and indifferent to the mystery of poetry.

Thomas’s atavistic druidry was in evidence from his earliest poems. In “Being but Men,” for example, written when he was seventeen, his Welsh otherworldliness is in full evidence:

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Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

Likewise, in the opening section of “Poet: 1935,” despite the title, written in 1933 when he was eighteen (he changed the date to match the year of publication), he invokes the Celtic spirit of the land of his birth as filtered through his gift:

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See, on gravel paths under the harpstrung trees
He steps so near the water that a swan’s wing
Might play upon his lank locks in the wind,
The lake’s voice and the rolling of mock waves
Make discord with the voice within his ribs
That thunders as heart thunders, slows as heart slows. 

He ends the poem with nature speaking to the poet:

	Who are his friends? The wind is his friend,
The glow-worm lights his darkness, and
The snail tells of coming rain.

Nature in Thomas’s poetry acts as a messenger of spiritual truth, though that truth does not always accord with the assumptions of the Protestant Christian milieu of his place and time. Not to say that Christianity doesn’t play a part in his poetry. In fact, it plays a very significant role in his vocabulary of images; and biblical allusions are more than incidental over the course of his poetic career. As Ferris observes,

“There are two views about Thomas and religion. One is that he was a ‘religious’ poet, and his life was a movement toward God. The other. . . is that religion was a stage-prop of his poetry; he used its language and myths, which he had learnt in childhood, without ever absorbing or caring about its central beliefs.”[8]

Ferris subscribes to the latter view—and he’s not wrong—but I think he sets up a false dichotomy here. Why can’t it be both? In his introduction to his Selected Poems (1952), Thomas writes that his poems “are written for the love of man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.” I’m willing to take him at his word. My hunch is that Thomas could not find a comfortable home in the varieties of institutional Christianity available to him within which to place his sincere, though decidedly atavistic, religious intuitions. His poetry, then, became a kind of church of the imaginal for him.

The voice, the voice.

The Druid Stares Back

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