Dylan Thomas. The Missing Link between the Oraculars and the Confessionals
The present study is interested in the work of Dylan Thomas, as compared with that of his close friend, John Berryman. Born in the same year (1914), they are now the iconic poets of two successive generations – the modernist one, in what concerns Thomas, and the confessional one, in Berryman’s case. The study shows that, even though Thomas is usually seen as a typical high modernist, with an oracular tone and a proclivity for metaphorical hermeticism, he has nevertheless some marks in his poetry proving an adherence to the confessional poetics – as synthesised by his famous programmatic line „Man be my metaphor”. Probably due to his early death, Tomas has never become a truly confessional poet (and there are serious doubts that he would have ever become one for real); but, as both a pre-confessional poet and a high modernist one, he is the missing link between the two poetical generations.
Keywords: history of modern Anglo-Saxon poetry, high modernism, confessional poetics, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman