Dylan Thomas’s 18 Poems: The Poet’s Articulate Voice

Abstract

In 18 Poems, Dylan Thomas’s search for rhymes around the poles is really a quest for the significant voice of poetry. At one level, the poem articulates the poet’s craving for home and the assurance that this resemblance of a home provides. But it reveals a deeper concern, a quest for and commitment to human reality; and for Thomas, reality is now identified with the paradoxical poetry of Yeats in contrast to Auden’s intellectual art. Linda M. Shires holds that “what is remarkable is the originality and intensity with which” his themes such as birth and death, process and decay, are introduced. To Walford Davies, Thomas’s early poetry, while offering “the reader only an impenetrable enigma” is “difficult and obscure in an individual way”. John Ackerman explains that the paradoxical attitude of Thomas in 18 Poems “occasions much of the obscurity … the images, however, are usually grouped by a sturdy advancing rhythm”. In the study of Thomas’s 18 Poems, the critics whose focal point is more on obscurity and musical setting hardly discuss his search for poetic image. Hence, this paper, adopting a figurative study, strives to unfold the meaning of the poet’s dramatic language suggestive of the Yeatsian articulate voice that contradicts the Word-centric articulate silence of Auden.