SOURCE: McNees, Eleanor J. “Wounding Presence: The Sacrificial Poetry of Dylan Thomas.” In Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill, pp. 110-46. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, McNees discusses religious imagery in Thomas's poetry.

… the story of the New Testament is part of my life.

—“Poetic Manifesto”

Aligned with Donne or Hopkins, Dylan Thomas is at best a religious renegade, a Welsh nonconformist with neither a strictly Anglican nor Roman Catholic affiliation. Though familiar with the Bible and with the Protestant Welsh Chapel, he was not raised with a reverence for the Eucharist nor with the Anglo-Catholic's belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament.¹ He cannot be said finally to ground his poetics on an explicitly Christian faith. Yet, his poetry, like that of Donne and Hopkins, is...