SOURCE: Heaney, Seamus. “Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas.” Salmagundi, no. 100 (fall 1993): 66-85.

In the following essay, Heaney examines Thomas's critical reputation in the years since his death.

Dylan Thomas is by now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. Mention of his name is enough to turn on a multi-channel set of associations. There is Thomas the Voice, Thomas the Booze, Thomas the Debts, Thomas the Jokes, Thomas the Wales, Thomas the Sex, Thomas the Lies—in fact there are so many competing and revisionist inventions of Thomas available, so many more or less corrective, reductive, even punitive versions of the phenomenon that it is with a certain tentativeness that one asks about the ongoing admissibility into the roll-call of Thomas the Poet.

Yet it was very much Thomas the Poet that my generation of readers and listeners encountered in our...