18 pages • 36 minutes read
All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave
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Background
Literary Context
Locating Dylan Thomas along any literary timeline of influence is problematic. Painfully aware that he did not have the polish of a college degree and concerned that the elitist poetry establishment in London would dismiss him as an untutored provincial from the Welsh countryside, Thomas dedicated himself to an ambitious study of poetry. He was a voracious reader, and his poetry (particularly of the 1930s) reflects his familiarity with a wide field of influences, most of which are evinced only subtly in poetry that otherwise strove for idiosyncrasy. Thomas perceived himself (and presented himself) as an original, a sui generis, although his copious notebooks attest to these influences.
Thomas’s literary context begins with his subversive wordplay. Schooled by his father’s often theatrical readings of a wide range of poetry as a kind of family entertainment, Thomas early on engaged poetry primarily as a verbal construct; a subtle manipulation of language empowered the poet’s creation not only with words, but through them. Poetry was intended to delight readers, upend their every expectation about language itself. Poetry, whatever its subject, was ludic by design.
Poetry, for Thomas, unsettles and even intimidates. Thomas forged a unique alloy that fused diverse literary influences and created something original. His fascination spanned the disruptive imagery and soaring philosophical curiosity of the metaphysical poets, most notably John Donne; to the lush aural effects of Edgar Allan Poe; to the subversive sprung rhythms of Gerald Manley Hopkins; to the dense spiritualism of both William Blake and William Butler Yeats; and to the poet’s primal sympathy with nature as seen in the High Romantics, most notably William Wordsworth.
Historical Context
Thomas’s work is nearly absent of historical context. He both was and was not a poet of the 1930s. Suspended between the two World Wars’ senseless carnage, Thomas came of age in what a fellow poet W. H. Auden would term the Age of Anxiety; the expression reflects a generation of English-language poets who despaired over a rising, dehumanizing industrialism that seemed to sterilize both nature and religion. It was an anxiety that Thomas did not share. When he arrived in London to make his mark as a poet, he felt out of place.
A brazen 20-something when he arrived in London, Thomas disparaged the poets of his era—most notably the titanic figures of W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot and their lesser acolytes such as Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, and Louise MacNeice—because he believed they politicized poetry. They sought, as Thomas saw, to preach a dreary gospel of ill-fated social activism. For Thomas, however, poetry was not designed to fix anything—it was designed to destabilize and inspire. Even as his generation of poets watched the rise of European totalitarianism and the impact of the global economic depression, Thomas could not accept despair as the last word, nor could he concede polemics and jeremiads as the poet’s highest calling. In turn, Britain’s 1930s establishment writers found Thomas’s wordplay at once lyrical and audacious, and his faith in individual dignity a kind of gorgeous irrelevancy. Thomas, a clever Nero-fiddler, ignored that continent-wide Rome was aflame. Reading “All That I Owe,” with its exultation over the human drama, a present-day audience would hardly know that Thomas’s contemporary world was unraveling; indeed, Thomas completed the poem the same week that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
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By Dylan Thomas
