Tribute to a Poet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 761, 19 February 1954, Page 10

Tribute to a Poet

HEARD Dylan Thomas read his remarkable play Under Milk Weed a few days before he died last year. The | Sey rocketing language, incomparably

read, and the warm humanity of his vision moved me deeply; I felt. certain that with this work Thomas was moving into even richer fields of poetic exploration. This, too, was the opinion, in the fine Tribute to Dylan Thomas (1YC) of M. K. Joseph and James Baxter, who spoke of Thomas’s development and his individual qualities. Allen Curnow’s personal reminiscences, notably of Thomas’s mixture of humility and confidence in his gifts, brought thé poet vividly alive. Denis. Glover gave a somewhat miasmic account of meeting Thomas in a wartime Soho pub; but I liked his descri tion of the. poetry as that of "being rather than of thinking." These were no machine-made, but genuine-felt, tributes to one of the greatest poets of our century, and perhaps the only really natural one. Curnow referred to the fact that Thomas, unlike so many modern poets, had no University education. I wish that, since two of the speakers were University teachers, someone had quoted Thomas’s significant remark thet the trouble with American poets was that they taught. "They graduate from college," he said, "and then they stay in college. When do they learn anything?"