Dylan Thomas: the code of night

280 Pages·12.813 MB·English

by  Thomas, Dylan, Holbrook, David, Thomas, Dylan

DYLAN THOMAS
The code of night
Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism
This carefully chosen selection of 56 classic works of literary criticism comes
from the archives of Athlone Press, one of the most distinguished publishers
of English criticism in the period 1950-2000.
The volumes in the collection cover all periods and styles of literary
criticism, from Beowulf to Pinter, and include works of literary theory as
well as studies of specific periods, writers or works. Authors include Herbert
Grierson, Barbara Hardy, Christopher Norris, George Kane, BMW Tillyard,
Patricia Ball, Geoffrey Tillotson, David Holbrook, and John Sutherland.
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ebook versions are also available.
Titles in English Literary Criticism are available in the following subsets:
English Literary Criticism: General Theory and History
English Literary Criticism: Pre-1700
English Literary Criticism: 18th-19th Centuries
English Literary Criticism: 20th Century
Other titles available in English Literary Criticism: Pre-1700 include:
Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, Peter Bowering
Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, David Holbrook
The Existential and its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives
on the Works of Beckett, lonesco, Genet and Pinter, L. A. C. Dobrez
The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, Katharine Worth
The Filibuster: A Study of the Political ideas
ofWyndham Lewis, D. G. Bridson
The Literary Criticism ofT.S. Eliot: New Essays, David Newton-De Molina
Theory and Personality: The Significance of T.S. Eliot's Criticism, Brian Lee
T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover, Donald J. Childs
DYLAN THOMAS
The Code of Night
David Holbrook
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS:
English Literary Criticism - 20th Century
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First published in 1972
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© David Holbrook, 2013
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1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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Bloomsbury Academic Collections
ISSN 2051-0012
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ISBN: 9781472508003 (Hardback)
ISBN: 9781472514639 (ePDF)
ISBN: 9781472536150 (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism - 20th Century)
Entire Collection ISBN: 9781472535412 (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism)
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed and bound in Great Britain
For Harry Guntrip
in gratitude for his immense work
in claryfying object-relations theory
and in promoting insights into
the problem of being human
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Extracts from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems
1934-1952 and Selected Letters (arranged by Con-
stantine Fitzgibbon) are reprinted with the per-
mission of the Dylan Thomas Estate and J. M.
Dent & Sons Ltd.
Contents
Introduction: The Genesis of Identity 1
1 Ethical Problems of the Schizoid
Individual 25
2 Dylan the Sea Son 35
3 The Role of the Reader 58
4 The 'Living Cipher' of the Early Poems 73
5 The Code of Night 90
6 The Role of the Critic 97
7 Picking the Life Out 123
8 Windy Houdini 137
9 No Return 143
10 Many Sounding Minded 176
11 'Sharp in my Second Death' 183
12 An Inability to Mourn 191
13 The Other Air 199
14 Lament and the Death Circuit 212
15 Laughing Delightedly at Hate:
Under Milk Wood 221
16 The Poet and the Point of Living 245
Bibliography 262
Index 267
Since the first womb spat forth a baby's corpse,
The mother's cry has fumed about the wind;
O tidal winds, cast up her cries for me;
That I may drown, let loose her flood of tears . . .
Dylan Thomas, The Woman Speaks
(TheAdelphi, 1934, p. 399)
1 learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded . . .
Dylan Thomas, From love's first fever to her plague
Introduction
The Genesis of Identity
Dylan Thomas's Vision and Prayer begins:
Who
Are you . . .
and ends with a verse which focuses its shape on the word T:
I
Am found . . .
The present work is an attempt to show that Dylan Thomas's
poetry was an anguished attempt to ask and to answer the ques-
tion, which is King Lear's question, 'Who is it that can tell me
who I am?' He suffered a profound confusion of identity and
what R. D. Laing has called 'ontological insecurity'. He was, in
fact, a schizoid individual—one of those persons, suffering from a
dreadful feeling of never having been born, psychically, into
whose plight we are now gaining important new insights. These,
I believe, will help us to understand Dylan Thomas's confused
behaviour, his incoherence, his alcoholism, his impulse to project
a public image, reactions to him ranging from religious adulation
to angry rejection, his sexual behaviour, his maddening unreli-
ability, his wit, his solemnity, his hate. But they also help us to
understand his poetry.
The critical question will remain, of course, as to how much his
poetry has to offer as creative art. As will be seen, however, the
'schizoid diagnosis' enables us to approach this question from a
different perspective. It does not absolve us from value judge-
ments but it makes the essential question about a work of art this:
'Does the work convey to us something insightful of the nature
of being human?' If we ask this, then I believe we shall conclude
that Dylan Thomas did communicate some very fresh insights into