DYLAN THOMAS AND SWINBURNE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 11

DYLAN THOMAS AND SWINBURNE

Sir,-In "Swinlan’s" first sentence we run into what I have come to think of as a national characteristic. Regardless of whether a metaphor proyides us with a shorter and more effective way of saying something we shall find ourselves in the cactus if we use the "flowery" phrase. In the third sentence we come across another: either we must-be for the work or against it. Any admission that our hero is not flawless shows, not that we have tried to be objective, but that we are hastily climbing down. Granting again that clarity is an ideal which Thomas too seldom attained, it would have been as_ interesting to "Swinlan" as to myself to have read a recent correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement wrestling with three tenable interpretations of a G. M. Hopkins poem which I thought was pretty plain sailing. There are also Mr. Smithyman’s remarks in the New Zealand

Poetry Yearbook, 1954 (page 88), showing that readers, too, may have their failings. In one portion our . correspondent flounders at the edge of the very old belief that spirit and flesh are symptoms for good and evil. While Augustine might be equal to putting my own case forward in a few well-chosen words, I quite candidly cry off. It is not so much a matter of argument as of faith, and I am of a different persuasion from your correspondent. Lastly, there is a little point which cuts right across the categories' of major and minor, and that is whether the work is relevant. Dylan Thomas’s work is obviously relevant to a great many people in this generation; one of the reasons for which I tried to give expression to in my last letter.

JOHN

SUMMERS

(Christchurch).

(This correspondence is now closed.---i.d.)