Dylan Thomas: 18 Poems

Published while Dylan Thomas was still a teenager, 18 Poems was the first collection of poetry to emerge from the notebooks which he had been writing from the age of 15. Surreal and often challenging, the poems demonstrate both the trends and anxieties of pre-war Wales and the personal literary ambitions of the young poet.

Several of the poems are about words and the act of writing poetry itself. From Love's First Fever describes how Thomas "learnt man's tongue" and became aware of the world through words.

The difficulty of translating this experience into poetry is explored with some dry humour in My Hero Bares His Nerves as a process which involves pulling "the chain". Evident in all of the poems in this collection is the combined influence of early 20th century Modernism and literary greats from the past.

Thomas was drawn to the tragic glamour of the Romantic poets, and this was apparent in the excessive lifestyle which he cultivated. He was keen to place himself within a literary heritage, and to achieve this he refers to poets such as William Blake. In The Force That Through The Green Fuse he uses images of the crooked rose and the worm to echo Blake's poem The Sick Rose.

But Thomas did not solely rely on the past for inspiration, and 18 Poems reveals his fascination with the modern world. In the poem All All And All he combines contemporary industrial words such as lever, ribbing metal and screws with Romantic images of nature. Similarly, the poem Our Eunuch Dreams uses images from film to ask "which is our world" and to explore the nature of reality.

Thomas held the belief that everything, especially in nature, is connected. This coloured his approach to religion. Poems such as Before I Knocked combine biblical images such as the "dying Christ" with symbolic literary characters such as Blake's Mnetha. He was not afraid to question conventional Christianity or to compare it with literary or pagan ideas.

Dylan Thomas carefully selected the poems which were to appear in 18 Poems in order to introduce his own technical skill as a writer, and also the themes and ideas which most preoccupied him. The creation of poetry, spiritual issues, modern times and the natural world all inspired him and all are developed, along with further motifs, in his later collections.