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Dylan Thomas And The Poetry Of The 1940s

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Further David Perkins asserts that: “Dylan Thomas was too relentlessly melodious and rhetorical, making the fifties poets’ all the more conscious of the morality of plainness. Moreover they could not recognize their world in the clichés of Thomas’ “Fern Hill” or “Under Milk Wood”, and thus they were motivated all the more toward an honest realism. That Thomas’ archetypal symbols seemed vague and obscure to the point of self-indulgence impelled them with stronger conviction toward lucid, rational discourse” (Perkins 423).
In Purity of Diction in English Verse, Davie says of the Movement that: “ it represented an originally passionate rejection, by one generation of British poets of all the values of Bohemia” (Davie, Purity of Diction 198-99).This …show more content…

It began to define the texture of its own poetry by contrasting it with ‘ the poetry of the 1940s’.By this phrase it meant the poetry Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Edith Sitwell, W.R.Rodgers and of the poets who had appeared in the “New Apocalyse” anthology The White horse man (1941).By taking these figures to be ‘the poets of the 1940s’ the Movement inevitably produced a distorted picture of the decade, but it was one that allowed their own work to appear to be a radical departure , the ‘new …show more content…

Enright’s introduction to the Poet’s of the 1950s criticized Thomas’s poetry on the familiar ground that it lacked thought: “Perhaps the kind of admiration which Thomas received encouraged him to leave “thinking” to the New Verse Poets; but poetry is like a human body in needing bones as well as flesh and blood”(Enright, Poet of the 1950s). A similar idea can be found in Davie’s Articulate Energy published in 1955, which looks back to a period in English history, the eighteenth century , where ‘strong sense’ was as common as terms as ‘strong feelings’. Davie sees Romantic and Modernist practice as having destroyed meaning and argument into poetry by over emphasizing the importance of images. He is able to admit that in some poetry notably that of Ezra Pound such practice has had beneficial effects; but one poet whose pursuit of images he will not tolerate is Dylan Thomas: ‘a sonnet by Dylan Thomas is unacceptable even on Hulme’s terms. When concrete images are crowded upon each other, they lose their concreteness. The milk is soured by the magic, the bread has lost its tang, and the clod its volume. The things will not stand still, but fluctuate and swim like weeds in a

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