Epilogue

Abstract

In his despair and confusion, Dylan Thomas developed the regrettable persona of the roaring boy in the last decade of his life, but the lyrical gift was always very much in evidence to the reader of his poems and letters and radio features, and to the audiences of Under Milk Wood. If the poems were fewer and further between, they were nonetheless seeking, and often finding, a new kind of lyric grace. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is already clichéd, as Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ and ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’ are clichéd. Already, generations of people have read past the ironies and complexities to discover a lyric perfection that is its own reward, and generations to come will do the same. The American poet, Robert Lowell, identified an affective, transformative capacity when trying to describe the significance of Thomas’s poetry: ‘it has a great deal to do with energy and making a poem radiant’, said Lowell, who could not ‘think of any English or American poet of this century who has that quality to such an extreme’: ‘they’re just so radiant and energetic. No poet bristled with talent and achieved it more than Dylan’.¹

By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done is a question for my own conscience.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria