Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep”: His Paradoxical Sensibility

Abstract

In “In Country Sleep”, Dylan Thomas offers the Yeatsian paradoxical sensibility, the process of magnanimous impersonal art as salvation to the tumultuous Auden who condescends to the mortal levelling charges of conspiracy, war mongering, tilting and toppling against him as his performance as an artist of Yeatsian pagan altruistic art songs has undone his success, popularity and appeal among the contemporary poets. Auden, despite the loss of his grandeur, continues with the Eliotian metaphysical process of aesthetic amoral art song that has made him great in the early phase. The time-conscious political poets of the thirties, while heading towards the romantic ideals of their early phase, mounts up their rage against Thomas for his deviation in the later art songs from his early poems of pity. The young Movement poets commend Auden’s early poem for the parable of pure poetry and aesthetic success and defends his avenging move against Thomas. The introductory poem implies that it is Thomas’s introspective process of individuation and integration, coherence and co-existence, his paradoxical sensibility, his tragi-comic vision of Grecian altruistic art song that guards his sober and benign functioning as an ardent emulator of the pagan altruistic tradition of Hardy, Yeats, Houseman and Blake, as a poet of reconciliation, harmonization and cosmopolitan culture analogous to his functioning in the early poem 18 Poems.