The Early Stories

Abstract

Though he thought it less important than his poetry, throughout his career Dylan Thomas’s prose composition was linked with his development as a poet, but this is particularly so in the early stories, which are close in theme and language to the early verse. These stories are strong in style and atmosphere and sensuous power but weak in narrative, being introspective and subjective to an unusual degree. Certainly the stories are close to the universe of the early poems, being richly charged in their language, almost surreal in the worlds they create, and owing much to a fertile imagination and an adolescent’s obsessional, introspective concerns with religion, sex and death. ‘Naturally, my early poems and stories, two sides of an unresolved argument, came out of a person who came willy-nilly out of one particular atmosphere and environment’ Dylan Thomas declared in 1952,1 turning our attention to the personality and Welsh background that produced them. The prose is essentially a poet’s prose, being sensuous, strongly rhymthmic, and rich in metaphor; and like Thomas’s own poetry at this time it is impassioned, apocalyptic, and the magic of the word and the emotions of the author direct the narrative.