Dylan Thomas: Wind in a Jar

I'm coming to you today live from the Poets House. Now that I've marked this haven as my territory, it's hard to stay away. Right now I can see the Statue of Liberty out the window as I bob my head over the poems of Dylan Thomas. I associate Thomas with New York because he died here at the age of 39, though he said of the city, "I don't believe in New York, but I love Third Avenue."

I've always loved Dylan Thomas because his poetry lets go in a way that I can't seem to allow my poems to do. For the first twenty years of his poetic fame, even the most admired critics and scholars of the day claimed that they didn't quite understand his poems. Robert Graves said Thomas was "drunk with melody and what the words were, he cared not." Most people today no longer believe this, especially since the publication of some of Thomas's letters to friends, in which he described his process and his desire to be read literally.

The most accurate description of his poems, in my opinion, is that yes, they were lyric and surreal, but that doesn't get you off the hook for finding meaning. They were an expression of the confusion of human existence, which by its nature necessitates a break with ordinary forms of articulation. Thomas chose to play more with syntax and was fond of contradictory images that evoked creation and destruction.

One of my all-time favorite lines of poetry are the closing lines to "Fern Hill" (which is where I took the title of this blog):

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Because of Thomas's familiarity with Freud and Jung, scholars like to give his poems a psychoanalytic reading, which I think is helpful. The language he chooses seems to express a desire to capture youth and conceal the darker nature of a harsh, adult reality. No wonder he was an alcoholic. Rather than follow in the neat, orderly (and erudite) footsteps of Yeats and Eliot, whose epics can be tiring, Thomas's poems are an attempt at capturing the wind in a jar. Pain, struggle, and eventually submission.