Welsh Journals

SIR: I feel I must write to you. I have read 'As Dylan Thomas might have looked on Criccieth' a second time and feel I must give vent to some of the cerebral confusion that is bub- bling at this clear-as-a-bell humming 1.15 in the morning. My point is that this article should have been named 'As Dylan Thomas would not have looked on Criccieth'. My trouble, I suppose is that I tend to take this kind of writing as symptomatic of the sincere regard people have for Thomas, I mean in their reaction to his work-in-general, what they feel its tone is,-and then they say they know how he looked on things. The first objection I have with reference to this kind of writing is that it seems to take that regrettable pantomime Under Milk Wood (I refer, of course, to the work as a whole, while some parts of it-the first four paragraphs, for instance-can legitimately be considered as 'good') as Dylan's masterpiece, as a kind of consuma- tion of his life's work. Instead of taking it as the laborious hack-piece which it so obviously is! I believe that Thomas will stand with Yeats and Eliot as one of the three best poets of the last half-century, and it really grieves me to see such a travesty of his worst UMW style Correspondence DYLAN THOMAS appearing in Wales, a magazine which encouraged Thomas in his 'sullen art', and an article written about a place which Thomas could have made shine in print. Wales is slow in seeing his genius! She scrambles behind with her Sunday-School clothes, and her self- perpetuating habits clinging to a moribund mythology, trying des- perately to convince herself that the Welsh language will live for more than another 100 years as a live, spoken, medium, and yet in her un- conscious there is a nebulous doomed feeling-her consciousness of, and touchiness about, 'culture' is a symptom of this. The writer sees 'the bawdy lights of the holiday camp'. And I cry out 'don't just stand there taking it all in, go down to those bawdy lights and soak yourself in them, and rock with the inmates, go on "mar the scene of tranquility from the swathed mound" Dylan was bawdy, he was always in among those lights, he threw stones at the cats and told the filthiest stories, but he had a greater light. Go on, Lane-Jones, be an 'inmate' and write poems like Thomas', who was prisoned within the cage of his own flesh- fighting genius!