Passionate Pilgrim

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DYLAN THOMAS (184 pp.)--New Directions ($3.50).

Britain's Dylan Thomas, who is only 32, is the first, and happy choice, for a new series which New Directions says will feature "important modern writers whose books are not easily obtainable."* Dylan Thomas is Britain's most spectacular and distinguished younger poet, but barely half of his prose and verse (The Map of Love, New Poems, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog) has been printed in the U.S. One possible reason: most of Thomas' brilliant, tempestuous work is so shrouded in uncommon meanings and metaphors that the average reader is likely to find his work incomprehensible without a guide.

The best guide is Thomas' own background and beliefs--which are helpfully summarized in Critic John L. Sweeney's introduction to this volume of poetry and prose. Like many another of England's poets--Donne, Herbert, Vaughan--Dylan Thomas is of Welsh lineage. He is also what the old Welsh bards called a "shaper"--one who refashions and revivifies the language bequeathed him by the poets of the past:

And from the first declension of the flesh

I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts

Into the stony idiom of the brain,

To shade and knit anew the patch of words

Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,

Need no word's warmth.

Thomas' poetic ancestors include druids, sun worshipers, fertility ritualists, wizards of Welsh folklore, psalmists and hymnists, the Bible. To this complex half-pagan, half-devout inheritance, Thomas has added more up-to-date influences--the intense experience of his boyhood in the Welsh countryside, his passionate faith in the Freudian conception of life as a struggle between the desire to procreate and the desire to find oblivious peace in death. Wholly absent from his poems are humor and political ideology: he reduces his rich and strange harvest of influences and beliefs simply to a "record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light"--the struggle of any natural growth:

The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Some of the earlier poems in this collection are marked by arty borrowings from the jargons of pseudo science and verse mannerisms ("the vowelled beeches," "the neural meaning," "the scurry of chemic blood"); in others, sense and emotion itself become lost in a game with words. But where Thomas is inspired by nothing more complicated than plain joy or direct recognition of beauty, his verse has a clear and bouncing simplicity--as in his picture of summer on a Welsh farm:

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

Readers will find this collection a good sampling of the word magic and feverish, often fervent passions that have won Dylan Thomas his present place in English poetry. Ballads, sonnets, unorthodox "visions" and "prayers"--all are dedicated to sensual man and a triumphant joie de vivre:

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write . . .

Not for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

The Author. Dylan (rhymes with villain, and is Welsh for "tide") Thomas was born in Swansea, South Wales. He covers his brownish, Byronic curls with a trilby and sports baggy tweeds, green shirts, Paisley ties. Short, cherubic, with fleshy lips and snub nose, he resembles more the robust, hard-drinking Elizabethan type of poet than the common hungry wolverine species. Thomas lives with his wife and two children in Oxford, goes up to London a few times a week, where he works as BBC scriptwriter and poetry reader (he is scheduled to read the title-role in his friend Poet Louis MacNeice's unfinished radio play Aristophanes). Hostile to salaried discipline, Thomas avoids steady employment, tolerates the Labor Government because "running down Labor . . . eventually brings you alongside the Conservatives, which is the last place you want to be." He is now working on a novel about the life of a young man in 1933.

*To come: U.S. ex-Expatriate Henry Miller, Russia's Boris Pasternak, Italy's late Italo Svevo, France's Jean Cocteau and, possibly, the late Paul Valery.

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