Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep”: His Paradoxical Sensibility

S Bharadwaj

doi:10.22158/sll.v4n4p12

Abstract

In “In Country Sleep”, Dylan Thomas offers the Yeatsian paradoxical sensibility, the process of magnanimous impersonal art as salvation to the tumultuous Auden who condescends to the mortal levelling charges of conspiracy, war mongering, tilting and toppling against him as his performance as an artist of Yeatsian pagan altruistic art songs has undone his success, popularity and appeal among the contemporary poets. Auden, despite the loss of his grandeur, continues with the Eliotian metaphysical process of aesthetic amoral art song that has made him great in the early phase. The time-conscious political poets of the thirties, while heading towards the romantic ideals of their early phase, mounts up their rage against Thomas for his deviation in the later art songs from his early poems of pity. The young Movement poets commend Auden’s early poem for the parable of pure poetry and aesthetic success and defends his avenging move against Thomas. The introductory poem implies that it is Thomas’s introspective process of individuation and integration, coherence and co-existence, his paradoxical sensibility, his tragi-comic vision of Grecian altruistic art song that guards his sober and benign functioning as an ardent emulator of the pagan altruistic tradition of Hardy, Yeats, Houseman and Blake, as a poet of reconciliation, harmonization and cosmopolitan culture analogous to his functioning in the early poem 18 Poems.

Highlights

The chief characteristic features and value of the twentieth century poetry are irony, inclusiveness, and complexity
In “In Country Sleep”, Dylan Thomas offers the Yeatsian paradoxical sensibility, the process of magnanimous impersonal art as salvation to the tumultuous Auden who condescends to the mortal levelling charges of conspiracy, war mongering, tilting and toppling against him as his performance as an artist of Yeatsian pagan altruistic art songs has undone his success, popularity and appeal among the contemporary poets
Eliot brings out his metaphysical ironic sensibility different from the contemporary poet D.H

Summary

Introduction

The chief characteristic features and value of the twentieth century poetry are irony, inclusiveness, and complexity. (Poems) And it is in this fidelity to the memory of Auden’s thought and feeling, in this dramatization of the creative dilemmas of the lost political poets, the war poets and the Movement poets that Thomas in the last phase departs from the metaphysical and the romantic tradition, and comes closest to the inclusiveness and the free play and free love of the pagan poet Blake who “spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him” and stands as an artist of noble impersonal art in contrast to Auden’s pure aesthetic and immortality according to the young poet Hughes: More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel Over the cage floor the horizons come. This paper, focusing on the contrary leit-motif of the contemporary poets concerned and their contra-functioning, purposes to reveal the distinctive position and the paradoxical sensibility of the dying poet Thomas in contrast to the whimpering end of Auden and his metaphysical ironic sensibility and the futility of the other contemporary poets and their dissociated complex sensibility

Discussion

Result

Conclusion