‘Innumerable bananas’: Dylan Thomas's style

‘Have I ever told you’, Dylan Thomas asked Pamela Hansford Johnson in a letter of 2 May 1934, ‘of the theory of how all writers either work towards or away from words? Even if I have, I'll tell it to you again because it's true. Any poet or novelist you like to think of—he [sic] either works out of words or in the direction of them. The realistic novelist— Bennett, for instance—sees things, hears things, imagines things, (& all things of the material world or materially cerebral world), & then goes towards words as the most suitable medium through which to express those experiences. A romanticist like Shelley, on the other hand, is his medium first, & expresses out of his medium what he sees, hears, thinks, & imagines’ (CL, 147–8). To Trevor Hughes in early 1935 he would report: ‘I think [poems] should work from words, from the substance of words and the rhythm of substantial words set together, not towards words. Poetry is a medium, not a stigmata on paper’ (CL, 208). It was an axiom that he repeated throughout his life. Thomas's point was that, while most writers start with a fixed idea of what they want to say and then find (‘work towards’) the words for it, others started with a set of words and let these prompt the movement ‘away from’ them towards the finished verbal object. The second of these attitudes was, for Thomas, the only real way to write poetry. And no-one would dispute, I think, that the appeal of Thomas's work stems, to some degree, from the sense we get when reading it that words are being allowed to express themselves…