Dylan Thomas
I Am Going to Read Aloud
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I am going to read aloud from the work of some modern British poets, and also read a few poems of my own. My own ones include some early ones, some fairly hurly-burly ones, very recent ones, reasoned, decent ones, lamenting ones and lamentable ones, together with a few comments whenever they may or may not be necessary.
I wondered what kind of words I should put down to introduce these laboriously churning poems of mine. Indeed, I thought they wanted from me no introduction at all. Let them stand on their own feet, the little lyrical cripples. But I felt, too, that there must be a few words of a kind before or between the ranting of the poems. A whole hour of loud and unrelieved verse-speaking is, I imagine, hell to anyone except some brash antiseptic forty-two-toothed smilingly ardent young hunters of culture with net, notebook, poison bottle, pin and label, or to the dowager hunters of small seedy lions, stalking the metropolitan bush with legs and rifles cocked, or to the infernal androgynous literary ladies with three names who produce a kind of verbal ectoplasm to order as a waiter dishes up spaghetti. But to an ordinary audience – not that there’s any such thing but only, like yourselves, bunches of eccentrics – there must be a hush between poems. And how was I going to fill that hush with harmless words until the next poem came woodenly booming along like a carved bee? I couldn’t, I knew, say much if anything about what the poems might mean. In a few cases, of course, I didn’t anyway know myself – though that is true, I hope, only of certain of my earliest published poems, explosive bloodbursts of a boily boy in love with the shape and sound of words, death, unknown love, and the shadows on his pillow. And for the rest of the poems, they are what they mean, however obscure, unsuccessful, sentimental, pretentious, ludicrous, rhetorical, wretched, ecstatic, plain bad. Or could I shove in autobiographical snippets saying where I lived and how, when I wrote this or that, indicating how I felt in heart and head at that particular time?
I could, for instance, talk about my education, which critics say I have not got. And that’s true enough. But I do wish I had learned some other languages apart from English, BBC Third Programme and saloon. Then perhaps I could understand what some people mean when they say I have been influenced by Rimbaud.
My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. I never could have dreamt there were such goings-on, such do’s and argiebargies, such ice-blasts of words, such love and sense and terror and humbug, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just awaking wits and splashing all over the pages, as they can never quite do again after the first revelation, in a million bits and pieces, all of which were words, words, words, and each of which seemed alive forever in its own delight and glory and right.
It was then, in my father’s brown study before homework, usually the first botched scribblings of gauche and gawky heart-choked poems about black bloomered nymphs, the jussive grave, and the tall, improbable loves of the sardine-packed sky, poems never to be shown to anyone except on pain of death, that I began to know one kind of writing from another, one kind of badness, one kind of goodness. I wrote endless imitations, though I never at the time of writing thought them to be imitations but rather colossally original, things unheard of, like eggs laid by tigers, imitations of whatever I happened to be golloping then, Thomas Browne, Robert W. Service, Stevenson, de Quincey, Eskimo Nell, Newbolt, Blake, Marlowe, the Imagists, the Boy’s Own Paper, Keats, Poe, Burns, Dostoievsky, Anon. and Shakespeare. I tried my little trotters at every poetical form. How could I know the tricks of this trade unless I tried to do them myself? For the poets wouldn’t soar from the grave and show me how their poems were done by mirrors, and I couldn’t trust the critics then – or now. I learnt that the bad tricks come easy and the good tricks, which help you to say what you think you wish to say in the most meaningful, moving way, naturally I am still learning – though in earnest company I must call these by other, technical names. Nothing in those days was too much for me to try. If Paradise Lost had not already been written, I would have had a shot at it.
My early days, dear God! I never thought that one day I might be here or anywhere filling up time before, I’m afraid, a drone of poems by talking about my early days, just as though I were a man of letters. I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for ten minutes, he was done for. But I feel all right. I suppose I am suffering from one of the first pleasant injections of insidious corruption. ‘My early days’ seems to me to suggest that I am responsible and established, that all the old doubts and worries are over. Now I need bother my head about nothing except birth, death, sex, money, politics and religion, that, jowled and wigged, aloof and branded as a bloodhound, sober as a judge in my bit of vermin, I can summon my juvenile literary delinquence before me and give it a long periodic sentence. For me to think of prefacing my poems by talking about my early days is to invite myself to indulge myself with a hundred tongue-picked, chopped and chiselled evocative shock phrases in a flamboyant rememoration of past and almost entirely fictitious peccadilloes of interest to nobody but me and my guardian angel, who was, I believe, an unsuccessful psychoanalyst in this life and who is lolloping above me now, casebook in claw, a little seedy and down at wing and heel, in the guttural consulting rooms of space. I am the kind of human dredger that digs up the wordy mud of his own Dead Sea, a kind of pig that roots for unconsidered truffles in the reeky wood of his past.
But still I gladly accept the fact that I first saw the light and screamed at it in a loud lump of Wales. I’m only human, as the man says who deep inside him refuses to believe it, and of course my writing would not be what it is – always experimental and always completely unsatisfactory – if it had not been for the immortal fry of the town in which I simmered up. Naturally, my early poems and stories, two sides of an unresolved argument, came out of a person who came willy-nilly out of one particular atmosphere and environment, and are part and parcel, park and castle, lark and sea-shell, dark and school bell, muck and entrail, cock, rock and bubble, accent and sea-lap, root and rhythm of them. And that, so far as I am concerned, is all there is to it. If I had been born and brought up in an igloo and lived on whales, not in it, about the same would be true, except that then it would have been extremely unlikely had I become a writer. And ‘Goody!’ cry my justified detractors.
Or I could preface this small reading by talking about poets. I think they’re pretty dull. It’s a common failing to underestimate the sheer ordinariness of the lives and characters of many dead poets, and to overestimate that of living poets whom one might come across. Indeed it is not unusual for people, after they have met a more or less living poet, to wonder with hardly concealed amazement how he could ever have produced the work he has. I except certain oldish poets alive today who are made solemn and unapproachable, not so much by their poetry or their strict religious observance, as by their judicial positions on the boards of eminent publishers who may even then, at one’s time of meeting, be considering one’s own first experimental novel of innocence lost and wisdom catastrophically gained by the age of nineteen. The same kind of amazement, the idol destroyed, ‘How could such a man have written such marvellous devotional poetry, I saw him fall downstairs yesterday in his suspenders!’ might well have occurred to us had we met many of the poets now dead. I think it was Logan Pearsall Smith who remembered how, as a small boy, he saw of all people Matthew Arnold in a restaurant, and Matthew Arnold talked and laughed much too loud.
I couldn’t talk about poets, but I do wish that I was reading only the work of other modern poets now, and not my own at all. That is, I wish I were reading the work of modern poets I like, for I like to read only the poets I like. This means of course that I have to read a lot of poems I don’t like before I find the ones I do, but when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is, ‘Here they are,’ and read them aloud to myself or to anyone, like yourselves, voluntarily cornered. And when I read aloud the poems of modern poets I like very much, I try to make them alive from inside. I try to get across what I feel, however wrongly, to be the original impetus of the poem. I am a practising interpreter, however much of a flannel-tongued one-night-stander.
But in my own poems I’ve had my say, and when I read them aloud I can only repeat it. When I read, for instance, my earliest poems aloud, my interpretation of them – though that’s far too weighty a word just for reading them aloud – can’t be considered as the final or original interpretation, performance or blare. I do not remember now the first impulse that pumped and drove those lines along, and that which is in them is for you more than for me, for you or anyone, or of course for no one, to make what you or he will make of them. In these poems I’ve had my say; now I’m only saying it again.
But what does it matter? Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the great undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exultation and ignorance, however unlofty the intention of the poem.
Now I’m going to read some poems straight, without hindrance, for this isn’t a lecture at all. It isn’t about trends and impacts and the influence of someone on someone else. It isn’t trying to prove anything by quotations, to groove one hypothetical school of poetry oilily into another, to jigsaw all the pieces which are poems into one improbable picture and then say, ‘Here it is, this is modern poetry.’ I am no grey and tepid don smelling of water biscuits. Only posterity can see the picture of the poetry of today as a whole, and the function of posterity is to look after itself. You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes and rhythms, ‘Yes, this is it, this is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.’ But you’re back again where you began. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ‘Everything,’ Yeats said, though he was talking of the highest moments of the most exalted art, ‘everything happens in a blaze of light.’ Only the printed page or the interior monologue or the private discussion can give to each separate poem the full concentrated time that the poem is justified in asking for the assessment of its success or failure to demonstrate its own hypothesis. In public all I think that can be presented is the poem itself, and all that can be experienced in public is the realization of the immediacy or lack of immediacy through which the hypothesis, the central motive of the poem, affects the reader through his ear. The printed page is the place in which to examine the works of a poem, and the platform the place on which to give the poem the works.
You won’t ask me any questions afterwards, will you? I don’t mind answering a bit, only I can’t. Even to such simple questions as ‘What is the relationship of the poet to society in a hydrogenous age?’ I can only cough and stammer. And some of the questions I remember from the nightmare past – ‘Tell me, are the young English intellectuals really psychological?’ ‘Is it absolutely essential do you think, to be homosexual to write love poems to women?’ ‘I always carry Kierkegaard in my pocket. What do you carry?’
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Dylan Thomas gave this speech as an introduction to a reading at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, 1952. It was later transcribed and published in the September 1956 issue of The London Magazine.
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