SOURCE: “Daedalus, Orpheus, and Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist,” in Renascence, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Spring, 1973, pp. 147-56.

In the following essay, Bruns attempts to find the sources of inspiration for the stories contained in Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

One of the most fascinating themes in literary history concerns the poet's inquiry into the conditions which make his art possible. The origins of this theme are in Homer and, more explicitly, in Hesiod. It is the theme of Wordsworth's Prelude and Coleridge's “Dejection” ode. It was the inquiry into the possibility of poetry that moved Matthew Arnold to give up poetry in favor of prose discourses upon man's unpoetic cultural life, and which, by contrast, induced Paul Valéry to begin writing poetry again after twenty years of silence. It is the theme of Yeats's “Ego Dominus Tuus,” Pound's “Mauberly, 1920,” Auden's The Sea...