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Annotated centenary edition of Dylan Thomas's collected poems

迪伦·托马斯诗集一百周年注释版

基本信息

批准号：
AH/J00815X/1
负责人：
John Goodby
金额：
$ 8.58万
依托单位：
Swansea University
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Fellowship
财政年份：
2012
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2012 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FJ00815X%2F1
关键词：
Annotated centenary edition Dylan Thomas

项目摘要

Dylan Thomas is one of the best-known of twentieth century poets, with a unique reputation as both a very difficult writer and as an immensely accessible one. The contrast between the 'sullen art' of some of his early lyrics on the one hand, and the radio personality, recording artist, film scriptwriter, and author of 'Fern Hill' and Under Milk Wood on the other, is reflected in the disparity between his popularity with the general reading public and the relatively low esteem he has enjoyed among academics and literary journalists since the mid-1970s. By the latter he is regarded as an 'excessive', uncontrolled writer, a literary dead-end who had no influence, and as irrelevant to the most important currents in twentieth century British poetry. However my own research, conducted over more than a decade, has led me to conclude that, far from being a neo-Romantic Thomas is first and foremost a modernist-influenced poet whose rhetorical strategies are aimed at producing radical ambiguity, the founder of a strain of an existential-apocalyptic tradition in British poetry which has had a profound, if hidden influence on the present via W. S. Graham, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The chief problem is that the detailed work of leading critics working on Thomas in the 1950s and 1960s - Winifred Nowottny, William T. Moynihan, William Empson, J. Hillis Miller, and John Bayley - was not built on after 1970. The turning-point in Thomas's critical-academic fortunes, which had been buoyant for two decades, came after W. H. Auden's death in 1973, and the rise of a conservative, anglocentric cultural climate in England (what Hugh Kenner called the 'sinking island syndrome'). Asserting Auden's status as a 'major' poet by way of cultural compensation for post-imperial decline, the 1930s were configured as 'the Age of Auden', and this required the sidelining of alternatives to Auden, of whom Thomas was the most significant. Thus, the standard histories of 1930s writing, by Samuel Hynes (1976) and Valentine Cunningham (1988), virtually exclude Thomas, even though two-thirds of his poetry appeared between 1934 and 1939. Effectively redescribed as a 1940s-only poet, his reputation suffered from the post-Movement dogma that this period was a 'dire decade' for poetry. Equally, a growing nationalist current in Anglo-Welsh literary studies meant that Thomas, while central to the canon, was perceived as anomalous to it because his work did not offer allegories of national self-realisation; nor did his hybrid refusal of fixed identity and blatant lack of guilt at being an anglophone writer, help in this respect. The result is that today even critics wishing to re-examine Thomas's poetry are unsure about its true significance, and how to interpret and place it. The new centenary edition of the poems is aimed at helping them do that, and at enabling the general reader to tackle poems which are tougher than the anthology staples, but equally beautiful and profound. It will make available the forgotten insights of earlier critics, but chiefly it will draw on my own research to present the poems in a way which reveals what they offer a contemporary audience - how they inventively ride the slippages of language, blur gender and existential boundaries, explore the religious impulse, subvert fixed identities, and map the relationship between the body and the conscious and unconscious mind. The aim is to offer a fuller, more nuanced and immediate grasp of the wit and daring of Thomas' work while respecting its necessary opacity. By substantiating the claim for Thomas's importance in these ways it is hoped to add to the challenge currently being made by critics such as James Keery, Leo Mellors and Andrew Duncan to the standard narratives about 1930s and 1940s poetry, and to fruitfully problematise the nature of Welsh, Anglo-Welsh, and British identities in literature.

迪伦·托马斯是二十世纪最著名的诗人之一，作为一位非常难懂的作家和一位非常平易近人的作家而享有独特的声誉。一方面是他早期歌词的“阴郁艺术”，另一方面是广播名人、唱片艺术家、电影编剧以及《蕨山》和《牛奶木下》的作者，这两者之间的对比反映在他在普通读者中的受欢迎程度与他自 20 世纪 70 年代中期以来在学者和文学记者中享有的相对较低的尊重之间的差距。后者认为他是一个“过度的”、不受控制的作家，一个没有影响力的文学死胡同，并且与二十世纪英国诗歌中最重要的潮流无关。然而，我自己进行了十多年的研究使我得出的结论是，托马斯远非新浪漫主义诗人，他首先是一位受现代主义影响的诗人，其修辞策略旨在产生彻底的模糊性，是英国诗歌中存在主义末日传统的创始人，这种传统通过 W.S. 格雷厄姆、泰德·休斯和西尔维娅·普拉斯。主要问题是，1950 年代和 1960 年代研究托马斯的主要批评家——威妮弗莱德·诺沃特尼、威廉·T·莫伊尼汉、威廉·恩普森、J·希利斯·米勒和约翰·贝利——的详细工作并不是建立在 1970 年后的基础上的。托马斯的批评学术命运的转折点出现在 W. H. 奥登 20 世纪去世后，二十年来一直蓬勃发展。 1973 年，一个国家的崛起英国保守的、以英国为中心的文化氛围（休·肯纳称之为“下沉岛综合症”）。通过对后帝国衰落的文化补偿来维护奥登作为“主要”诗人的地位，1930年代被定义为“奥登时代”，这需要排除奥登的替代者，其中托马斯是最重要的。因此，塞缪尔·海因斯（Samuel Hynes，1976）和瓦伦丁·坎宁安（Valentine Cunningham，1988）撰写的 1930 年代标准历史实际上将托马斯排除在外，尽管他的三分之二的诗歌出现在 1934 年至 1939 年间。实际上，他被重新描述为一位 20 世纪 40 年代的诗人，他的声誉受到了后运动教条的影响，即这一时期是诗歌的“可怕的十年”。同样，盎格鲁-威尔士文学研究中日益增长的民族主义潮流意味着托马斯虽然是经典的核心，但被认为是异常的，因为他的作品没有提供民族自我实现的寓言；他的作品并没有提供民族自我实现的寓言。他对固定身份的拒绝和对作为一名英语作家的公然缺乏负罪感的混合在这方面也无济于事。结果是，今天即使是希望重新审视托马斯诗歌的批评家也不确定它的真正意义，以及如何解释和定位它。这些诗歌的新百年纪念版旨在帮助他们做到这一点，并使普通读者能够阅读比选集主要内容更难但同样美丽和深刻的诗歌。它将提供早期批评家被遗忘的见解，但主要是利用我自己的研究，以一种揭示它们为当代观众提供什么的方式呈现这些诗歌——它们如何创造性地驾驭语言的滑坡，模糊性别和存在的界限，探索宗教冲动，颠覆固定的身份，并绘制身体与有意识和无意识心灵之间的关系。目的是让人们更全面、更细致、更直接地了解托马斯作品的智慧和勇气，同时尊重其必要的不透明性。通过以这些方式证实托马斯的重要性，我们希望能够增加詹姆斯·基里、利奥·梅勒斯和安德鲁·邓肯等批评家目前对 1930 年代和 1940 年代诗歌的标准叙事提出的挑战，并有效地对威尔士、盎格鲁-威尔士和英国文学身份的本质提出问题。