Dylan Thomas at the "BBC"

View books by Dylan Thomas.

Towards the End of Poetry - Rated
Dylan Thomas reads his own poems and also some short stories. The readings are theatrical performances, and 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 and 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 and John Betjeman. Both have an individuality and accessibility that is lacking in their younger contemporaries and successors, and 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 and New Labour, bring with them an air of literary London in the 1940's as well as pre-War Wales. The poetry has a recognisable, individual style and 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-form in English and that he lacks the greatness of the major, and indeed some minor, poets of the pre-recording era. His creativity and images seem to have mostly burst out when he was still a teen-ager and he may have spent his adult career poetic career trying to give them sense and application. But there is an individual language here, and 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 and place.