The Dead Poet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 30

The Dead Poet

HERE is an advantage to a poet in being dead. His friends tell all; he becomes immensely interesting. This is the advantage Dylan Thomas has over his contemporaries, though it seems unlikely that any of them is building up such extravagant memories as he did. And it isn’t irrelevant to a poet’s work to know what kind of man he is: it illuminates places which remain dark so long as he is alive and unknown. So when Thomas’s turn came on Wednesday poetry readings, after a couple of weeks when Judith Anderson made Edna St Vincent Millay sound remarkably trite (I don’t know if she really is), that marvellous voice, and the talk there has been about him, were enough to make one sit up and take notice. He began with remarks on poetry in his best radio-script style, a richness of words. And then three of his poems. I have a lazy preference for poems I can grasp, and much of Thomas I find ungraspable. I enjoy the roll of words, the pictures they make; but of what the pictures make I can often see only in a glass darkly. Yet this reflection is exciting enough to drive me back to the poems and to make me cecide that the voice, Milk Wood, the journalism, the legend and John Malcolm Brinnin are nothing to this. And that is how the reading left me. :