Mixed Media: Dylan Thomas (2013)

Captain Cat from Under Milk Wood.

The Mixed Media column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dylan Thomas 60th anniversary of his death

On 9 November it is the 60th anniversary of the death of the 'Welsh bard' Dylan Thomas, famous for his prose poem Under Milk Wood, and poems such as Do not go gentle into that good night and And Death shall have no dominion.

In 1934 Thomas wrote 'I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production from man and from the sources of production at man's disposal, for only through such an essentially revolutionary body can there be the possibility of a communal art'.

In 1933 Thomas had met ‘communist grocer’ Bert Trick in Swansea who became his mentor. Thomas visited Bert's grocer's shop in Brynmill which Thomas recalled in Return Journey: 'Bert Trick in the kitchen threatened the annihilation of the ruling classes over sandwiches, jelly and blancmange'. In 1933 Thomas writes of 'an outgrown and decaying system in which light is being turned into darkness by the capitalists and industrialists' and that capitalism because it 'seeks only profit for the few is not an efficient mechanism for satisfying the needs of the many'.

Thomas wrote that 'society to adjust itself has to break itself; society has grown up rotten with its capitalist child, and only revolutionary socialism can clean it up'. Later he writes 'If it can be forced home on the consciousness of the people that the present economic system is ethically bad, the seed has been planted that may in time grow into a fine revolutionary flower'. He saw society 'composed of financial careerists and a proletarian army of dispossessed. Out of the negation of the negation must rise the new synthesis'.

During the Second World War Thomas made films for the Ministry of Information such as A City Re-born which looks at Coventry and he says about war-time production that it 'makes you think what a hell of a lot they can produce if it’s for use and not for sale'.

After the war Thomas wrote two film screenplays; The Doctor and the Devils based on the body-snatchers Burke and Hare in which he portrays the class nature of society and Rebecca's Daughters based on the toll gate riots in Wales in 1843 in which he says governments only bring in reforms when they are 'afraid of a revolution'.

In 1952 on tour in America Thomas gave free poetry readings for the Socialist Party of the USA. He died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City sixty years ago this month.

Steve Clayton