Customer Reviews

Towards the End of Poetry - By: Laurence 913, 25 Jan 2004
Dylan Thomas reads his own poems & also some short stories. The readings are theatrical performances, & there was a genuine audience for them at the time. Poets reading their own work appear rarely on disk or tape. Recording was invneted at the end of the nineteenth century, so most of the great poets are, of course, excluded. There is a wax cylinder of a muffled Browning slightly misquoting How They Brought The Goods News from Ghent to Aix, but this is a curiosity.Most of the leading poets of the first half of the 20th century (lesser poets than their predecessors, though often with original & memorable styles) are unrecorded, but not Thomas. In the second half of the century many poets of the Arts Administration Age may have recorded their works, but one doubts whether any audience present would represent ordinary poetry-lovers.
For poetry that a general audience finds worth listening to we are left with the BBC's plentiful recordings of Dylan Thomas & John Betjeman. Both have an individuality & accessibility that is lackingin their younger contemporaries & successors, & it is significant that they were also known for their prose works. These recording of Dylan Thomas, made by the BBC before it became a mouthpiece for the Arts Council & New Labour, bring with them an air of literary Londonin the 1940's as well as pre-War Wales. The poetry has a recognisable, individual style & speaks directly to the listener. It is not self-obsessed, prosaic, trivial, arbitrary or incomprehensible. We can recognise 'The fishing-boat-bobbing sea' or 'Rage against the dying of the light'. How many ordinary readers can quote a line, or even name a poem, by Mr or Mrs Hughes or their contemporaries? It may be that Thomas (like Betjeman) represents the end of poetry as a general art-formin English & that he lacks the greatness of the major, & indeed some minor, poets of the pre-recording era. His creativity & images seem to have mostly burst out when he was still a teen-ager & he may have spent his adult career poetic career trying to give them sense & application. But there is an individual language here, & it is worth listening to, as are the short stories, many of which are poetical sketches by a less than omniscient author, often a child or adolescent boy learning about life at a distinct time & place.