SOURCE: Volsik, Paul. “Neo-Romanticism and the Poetry of Dylan Thomas.” Études Anglaises 42, no. 1 (January-March 1989): 39-54.

In the following essay, Volsik examines Thomas's participation in the British neo-Romanticism movement of the 1930s through the 1950s.

In this article I do not wish to discuss the much-commented affinities between Dylan Thomas and the poets of High Romanticism—his use of “pantheism,” his (Wordsworthian) use of the themes of childhood and innocence, his sensuous (Keatsian) use of language, his eschewing of the distancing devices of erudition and irony. These possible affiliations, and others, have been the centre of a great deal of critical discussion (Shapiro, Press, Bayley, Bedts, Korg). One might add that, as for many of the Romantics, Thomas' life and work echoed each other in a particularly striking way. What Thomas himself said of Alun Lewis (killed in 1944 in Burma) is true of his own poems: “[I] could see...