SOURCE: “Imitation and Invention: The Use of Borrowed Material in Dylan Thomas's Prose,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, July, 1968, p. 275-95.

In the following essay, Davies examines the influences of Thomas Hardy, the Mabinogion, Charles Dickens, Ambrose Bierce, and others on Thomas's stories and film scripts.

Brander Matthews once proposed a grading of the short story in terms of its compliance with a catalogue of qualities—something like a working list of litmus tests, of which the most notable were unity, compression, originality, ingenuity and fantasy (Saturday Review, July 1884). These features, or aspects of them, are certainly valid yardsticks, but Matthews's third requirement, ‘originality’, has to be defined and re-defined if it is to be a yardstick of any critical use. Influences which are assimilated into tone or theme in the ordinary run of prose fiction need not be closely defined; but when, on the other...