Monsters and borders

Like much poetry of the 1930s, Dylan Thomas's traced the contours of the zeitgeist in its concern with borders and the menace that they portended in a Europe fragmented into new nation-states and jittery with rumours of impending war. Thomas, however, had a head start, in this respect, on the English New Country poets, for, as Tony Conran notes, ‘Anglo-Welsh is a description of a frontier as much as a culture’, and Anglo-Welsh poets were adept at ‘mov[ing] across this shadowy no-man's land in both directions’. In Thomas's case, his English contemporaries’ interest in being ‘on the frontier’ was written across a concern with border-zones and boundary-crossings, which derived from a far deeper, centuries-old condition. As I've argued in previous chapters, boundaries in Thomas's work were inscribed at the level of the body and in language, too, where they were treated as constitutive of the self in ways beyond the reach of programmes of rational analysis or therapy.