Table Of ContentDYLAN THOMAS
The code of night
Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism
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The Filibuster: A Study of the Political ideas
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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
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DYLAN THOMAS
The Code of Night
David Holbrook
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS:
English Literary Criticism - 20th Century
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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
