'Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice': Dylan Thomas and Irish writers
6:00pm - 7:30pm /
Thursday 1st May 2025
/ Venue: Rathbone Theatre Eleanor Rathbone Building
Type: Lecture /
Category: Department
- Viola Segeroth
- Admission: Free but registration requested at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/greek-in-the-irish-sea-the-ageless-voice-dylan-thomas-and-irish-writers-tickets-1272644196049?aff=oddtdtcreator
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Join the Institute of Irish Studies for a talk by Dylan Thomas expert Professor John Goodby (Professor of Arts and Culture, Sheffield Hallam University) and excerpts from Stan Tracey's Jazz Suite Inspired by Under Milk Wood by pianist Richard Wetherall with narration by Seamus Lavan. The evening will conclude with a wine reception, during which John Goodby will sign copies of his co-authored biography Dylan Thomas (Critical Lives).
'Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice': Dylan Thomas and Irish writers
In a review of 1934, the youthful Dylan Thomas claimed: 'The true future of English poetry, poetry that that can be ... read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries. ... Wales [and] Ireland ... are building up a poetry that is as serious and genuine as the poetry in Mr Pound's Active Anthology'.
Like the work of the Irish writers he admired - he thought W. B. Yeats 'the greatest modern poet', while James Joyce was the single biggest influence on his style - Thomas exemplifies the way in which writers of the 1920s and 1930s from the so-called margins wrote back to the centre, deploying modernist experiment, linguistic excess, parody, and surrealism to undermine metropolitan pretensions to authority.
Married to Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of Yeats's friend, the minor poet Francis Macnamara, Thomas also enjoyed many material and familial contact with Ireland, which he visited in 1935 and 1946, while traces of his literary influence and personality can be found in the work of poets as varied as Medbh McGuckian and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the 'Belfast Group' of the 1960s - Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.
This talk will address this little-known web of influence and impact, with a primary focus on Thomas's debt to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a title he mischievously purloined for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as well as the Yeatsian models for his early short stories and poems such as 'In my craft and sullen art'. It will also touch on the apparently stark differences between his famous radio work, Under Milk Wood, and those by Samuel Beckett, such as All That Fall.
'Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice': Dylan Thomas and Irish writers
In a review of 1934, the youthful Dylan Thomas claimed: 'The true future of English poetry, poetry that that can be ... read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries. ... Wales [and] Ireland ... are building up a poetry that is as serious and genuine as the poetry in Mr Pound's Active Anthology'.
Like the work of the Irish writers he admired - he thought W. B. Yeats 'the greatest modern poet', while James Joyce was the single biggest influence on his style - Thomas exemplifies the way in which writers of the 1920s and 1930s from the so-called margins wrote back to the centre, deploying modernist experiment, linguistic excess, parody, and surrealism to undermine metropolitan pretensions to authority.
Married to Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of Yeats's friend, the minor poet Francis Macnamara, Thomas also enjoyed many material and familial contact with Ireland, which he visited in 1935 and 1946, while traces of his literary influence and personality can be found in the work of poets as varied as Medbh McGuckian and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the 'Belfast Group' of the 1960s - Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.
This talk will address this little-known web of influence and impact, with a primary focus on Thomas's debt to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a title he mischievously purloined for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as well as the Yeatsian models for his early short stories and poems such as 'In my craft and sullen art'. It will also touch on the apparently stark differences between his famous radio work, Under Milk Wood, and those by Samuel Beckett, such as All That Fall.