Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances: A Poetic Culture

Abstract

From a study of Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances(1946) emerges a distinctive approach to poetry: poetry as asource of inspiration and solace to different strata of humanity. W.H. Auden’s system of freedom from personalexperience offered in Poems(1928) which was an inspiring ideal of intensity or God’s Word to the War poet F.T.Prince emphasizes the mind’s need of acquiring identity through suffering and transcendental experience. It is thisfaith in the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of experience that is almost repudiated in the poems of theother War poets, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, and Keidrych Rhys. The adverse criticism of Auden’s contemporaries andof the War poets on the aesthetic transcendence of Auden and of Thomas as “unpitying, passion-tossed” seared theirbody and spirit. The consoling assurance to Thomas in such moments of lonely exile and mental crisis as to thepoet’s task was the thought from A.E. Houseman, and Auden in Eliot alone discovered the meaning of his life andpoetry.Thomas’s later poetry, being a paradox different from a fanciful construction of single meaning, standsopen-ended in its meanings. Hence this paper, adopting a semantic study of Thomas’s paradoxical poems, aims atunravelling the meaning of his poetic “culture that is profitable,”consoling and sustaining to fellow-mortals.