SOURCE: “Dylan Thomas as Poet and Story-Teller,” in Dutch Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1981, pp. 222-37.

In the following essay, Tinkler examines the differences between Thomas's poetry and prose.

The manuscript of Adventures in the Skin Trade, Dylan Thomas's first sustained piece of prose fiction, was returned to the author by the publishers with a note saying that it was not “the great and serious autobiographical work to which they had been looking forward”. Vernon Watkins remembers that Thomas “was indignant and yet amused by the note. Why did publishers always want a writer to impress people, rather than entertain them? His serious work, he knew, was his poetry.”¹ One wonders whether the last sentence really expresses what Thomas thought, in view of the fact that his later writing consists less and less of poetry, and more and more of a variety of forms in which entertainment plays a...