‘Meaty & metaphysical’: body, language and mind

We often speak of the ‘body’ or ‘corpus’ of a writer's work, but in Dylan Thomas's case, the metaphor seems somehow tautologous, given the extraordinary prominence of the body and bodies within it. This is an outcome of the process poetic, with its microcosmic figuration of the macrocosm, according to which the body ‘has roots in the same earth as the tree’, such that ‘[a]ll thoughts and actions emanate from the body’ and ‘the description of thought or action – however abstruse it may be – can be beaten home by bringing it onto a physical level. Every idea, intuitive or intellectual, can be imaged or translated in terms of the body, its flesh, skin, blood, sinews, veins, glands, organs, cells or senses’ (CL, 57). Thomas even claimed: ‘I think in cells’, adding ‘Nearly all my images, coming, as they do, from my solid and fluid world of flesh and blood, are set out in terms of their progenitors’ (CL, 38). From cell mitosis in the womb to the panorama of human evolutionary descent, such ‘cells’ and ‘progenitors’ are thought and set out in bodily terms in poem after poem. This is particularly the case in 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems, in which human anatomy is vividly, viscerally realized in a kind of ghastly gothic anti-blazon of skin, eyes, teeth, ribs, bone, hair, blood, brain, nerves, womb, cock, nails, breasts, heart, ‘manseed’, sweat and other bodily fluids.

That blazon was, as I argued in Chapter 1, central to Thomas's Welsh gothic-grotesque modernism – a response to Eliot's call for poetry that was aware of ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’. It rejected the prizing of mind over body, as found in New Country poetry, and accentuated the materiality of language itself as a kind of maternal body.