I think you're being unduly dismissive of Dylan Thomas. I have
never heard anyone claim he was better than Yeats. Thomas is
a poet who has written about six poems as beautiful as any in
the language, but the source of his extraordinary fame was his
genius as an ACTOR of poems, other poets' as well as his own.
Better than anyone I have ever heard in my lifetime, better
than anyone recorded on historic tapes, Thomas communicated
the shear sensual pleasure of poetic language: the lilt of the
meters, the lure of the vowels, the satisfactions of the consonents.
Anyone who heard Thomas recite his poems wanted to run right
out and buy his book and do it for himself!
Thomas was also an actor-storyteller of the drunken celtic
sort, and people were more than willing to put up with his boorish
downside to listen to him telling tales. His short stories are
very fine.
I have some Yeats and Eliot and Auden and Hopkins-- and Masters,
Masters may not be first rate but he is a wonderful poet for
actors-- by heart, and take great pleasure in them. But I know
a larger quantity of Thomas than of any poet other than Shakespeare,
and it isn't because I think he is a "great". It's
because when I read his words or say them aloud I am really
performing a mental duet with the memory of that glorious Bardic
voice of his, the perfect voice for poetry written within that
performance tradition. (11/08/04)
by 
