Declaring an interest, poetic or scholarly, in Dylan Thomas often brings a response which runs along the lines: ‘I used to love Dylan Thomas when I was young but I haven't read him for years.’ It is commonplace that Dylan Thomas is an obscure poet with a popular readership, a technically disciplined poet who is also a byword for indiscipline and self-indulgence, and that his poems are loved by adolescents, a love frequently renounced in middle age. An example of such abjuring is the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips's shudderingly middle-aged revulsion from Thomas's ‘slap-dash, slapstick, and apparently naively sophisticated Celtic fluency’, renouncing the person Phillips was when he loved Thomas because, Phillips remembers or believes he remembers, Thomas ‘seemed to be the apotheosis of “having a voice”’. To renounce your first love seems ungrateful. Behind Phillips's repudiation lies the charge that Thomas's writing is masturbatory, and not far behind either in the light of the adjectives ‘slap-dash, slapstick’, otherwise so oddly applied to a poet of stringent technique; Thomas remained stuck with his stick, while Phillips grew into the adult world where intercourse and literature emerge as regulated practice out of the adolescent enjoyment of voice. Thomas is a writer who troubles us once we become literary, and Thomas's poetry may be popular in part because it disregards the bounds of propriety and the literary. His lyric practice dissents from lyric as intimate address overheard – a now-trite formulation investing poetry with a weird shame, as though eavesdropping were the foundation of generic individuality – and inclines rather to a lyric of a physical sonority made perceptible, almost palpable, through silent reading as well as listening. Thomas is not so much in love with his own voice as stroked into corporeal presence by his poetry's sonority, shamelessly.

Such thoughts are provoked by a submerged history of unrespectable poetry traced by Daniel Tiffany in his book My Silver Planet, but Tiffany's wide-ranging diagnosis of poetic kitsch does not quite apply to Thomas, as it would to the gaudier British surrealist and Apocalyptic verse contemporary with Thomas’s.