That what the headlines made of Thomas was a gross travesty has long been asserted by poets and writers; some, like Louis MacNeice, who had worked with him at the BBC; others who knew him closely like Vernon Watkins; those who had done so since his boyhood like Daniel Jones; and many more. Nonetheless it still seems necessary to labour the point about the man and the mask, the writer and the bard, what Thomas called ‘the colour of saying’ (‘The gentle seaslides of saying’) and the saying. Just mention him in some circles and the first thing you’ll be told, firmly, is that: ‘The jury is still out’. Or that his ‘durability’ remains in question.1 Or that his example was one to recover from, as from the DTs.2 But then the ‘jury’ is always out. And not just on Dylan Thomas. It is in the Heraclitean nature of things. Only consider the tortuous reception, down the centuries, of (Thomas’s deep love) John Donne to grasp the point, or that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whom may be said, one of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the other of the nineteenth century, to have been reinvented as twentieth-century poets. Then, as individuals, we find our affections for a poet’s work waxing and waning and waxing again down our lifetimes. It isn’t that we exhaust them, but they exhaust us. We need time apart to re-charge our batteries, to learn once more how absence makes the heart grow fonder. How poems move on, as if behind our backs.3
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