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An Update for Dylan Thomas’s Aunt

“Fie on you, aunt! I’ll show you how
To elevate your middle brow,
And how to scale and see the sights
From Modernist Parnassian heights.”

—Dylan Thomas, “A Letter to my Aunt Discussing
the Correct Approach to Modern Poetry”

Your nephew Dylan once addressed
To you some lines, where he expressed
In playfully satiric bites
His views on Modernism’s blights:
Bohemian-surrealist cant,
Weak punctuation, lines aslant,
Explicit sex, morbidity,
A wayward lack of clarity.

Since then, dear aunt, it’s gotten worse
For travelers in the land of verse;
The older frauds may now be dated
But posturing has not abated.
Meterless emotions rage
And sprawl across the martyred page;
Lines are limping, slipshod, fraught
With blunders of the badly taught;
Diction shows a range and shade
Suggestive of the second grade;
No subject matter but one’s life
And how it’s filled with pain and strife;
Or else blasé contented purrs
About one’s “wholeness.” Thought defers
To feelings of the heart and gut.
And so we have a massive glut
Of treacly, therapeutic slop
And no one knows when it will stop.

Today, although true poetry
Has died, it walks vampirically.
Hundreds of little journals spread
Effusions of the living dead;
Grants abound, and readings sprout—
Dead within, alive without.
Seminars and workshops hum,
Trendy poseurs go and come.
All this hype is dust and shadow:
Poetry as Nosferatu.

I’d love to hear your nephew’s views
About the pap this new age spews:
I see him going into shock
While listening to the current flock
Of group-encounter escapees
Who really think that poetry’s
A way to solve one’s psychic troubles.
Lord, he would have pricked their bubbles!
I hear him shouting that true art
Eats like acid to the heart,
Leaves a poet a dry husk
Forgotten in approaching dusk.
Poetry as “healing craft?”
Dylan would have sobbed—or laughed.

Your nephew would have wanly smiled
At twits who chase their “inner child.”
He would have dismissed with a stroke
(Or treated as a puerile joke)
Our “concrete poems”—an apt phrase
For rock-hard verbiage that slays
Every attempt at grace or wit—
Poetic lumps of mortared grit.
He’d hold in a contempt sublime
Those rankest pustules of our time:
Poets politically correct
Who publish nothing till they’ve checked
That verses have the right addition
Of socially approved contrition.

Above all, the Portentous Hush
That hangs about this verbal mush
Would have frayed your nephew’s temper.
He who shouted Vivat semper!
To life and liquor, rowdy fun—
Such humbug would have made him run.

But unlike me, he’d be too civil
To raise his voice against such drivel.

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Poet’s Note

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) had several maternal aunts to whom he was close, and with whom he spent much of his early childhood. It is not certain which one received the poem “A Letter to my Aunt…” on which my present poem is based.

See the excellent article “Dylan Thomas and his aunties: the other women in the poet’s life” by David Thomas, who has written extensively on the Welsh poet’s life and work. The address is https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandhisaunties/

In one of his letters Thomas tells his correspondent that a poet should “treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone… hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them.” Although he was profoundly influenced by modernism, he was clearly well aware of some of the absurdities that were being pushed in its name.

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This poem was first published in The Formalist in 1996.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

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28 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Your scathing satire, Dr. Salemi, waltzes across the modern poetic scene like a raging bull intent on pitching such poets out of the pasture. Your structure, meter, rhyme, and message are complete opposites of the modernist waste of effort and of our time. Dylan wrote some magnificent love poems with “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” perhaps his best. If channeling the inner child is a problem, then put me in the company of Robert Louis Stevenson. Some poets have a great range of interests and genre. I have noted how great has been your own range of tastes for various subjects. I praise you and your magnificent poetic skills for taking apart the putrid prose of modern poetry.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, LTC Peterson. The really good modernists (like Dylan Thomas in some respects) were capable of producing excellent formal and metrical verse when they wanted to. Dylan’s “A Letter to my Aunt…” is a case in point. I just followed his lead in meter and rhyme scheme.

      Reply
  2. James Bellanca

    Your words say it all and with a puckish smile I lined.

    Reply
  3. Mark Stellinga

    I’m with ya’ 100%, Joe, and bless your heart for so vehemently torching what, more often than not, is what the disillusioned, wanna-be ‘poet’ comes up with once they’ve ultimately given up on manufacturing ‘genuine Verse’. As Truman Capote famously put it when critiquing someone’s bit of – ‘rhyming’s no longer important’ — ‘That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing!” Thanks for a fun Monday morning piece – 🙂

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Mark. It’s interesting that Dylan Thomas saw (back in the 1930s) the same idiocies that we here at the SCP have complained of frequently.

      Reply
  4. jd

    A beautifully embellished opinion piece. Thank you for the link, also.

    Reply
  5. Norma Pain

    I really enjoyed this poem Joseph. The subject and the style had me wishing I could come up with something similarly creative and meaningful. Loved it.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Norma, you’ve written dozens of excellent poems, all of them creative and meaningful. The proof is right here in the SCP archives.

      Reply
  6. Cynthia L Erlandson

    What a great description of “Modernism’s blights”. Meterless emotions”; “the martyred page”; “treacly, therapeutic slop”; “poetic lumps of mortared grit” — all of these phrases and many more get right to the heart of the matter of the attempted wreckage of language beautifully crafted.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Cynthia. The Free Verse Poetry Establishment still has such advantages of wealth, support, prestige, and control of both publishing and academia that the small formalist reaction can barely make a mark, and for that reason savage satire is the best choice of weapon against that behemoth.

      Reply
  7. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Joe, what a wonderfully wounding poetic volley fired from the highly-polished weapon of form. This glorious poem is expertly rhymed, masterfully metered, and delightfully lavish with wit. I love the way this poem takes aim at the pouting parade of poetry’s poseurs with such glee and command that even the most miserable muse will be forced to crack a smile. For me, the surface bark of bitterness gives way to a heartbreaking awareness. The great thing about this poem is that beneath the hilarity and savagery lies a deep care for the art form it defends. I can feel the grief for that loss of rigor, clarity, and craft – a care I share…

    … But here’s where I might veer off course ever so slightly. While I, too, wince at the glut of slushy, spineless “healing verse,” I still believe that true poetry can have restorative properties. Not the kind sold to us by the cognoscenti along with bananas taped to walls and cows in formaldehyde, but the authentic kind—the poetry that finds music in mayhem, beauty in despair, and sunshine in the shadows. When crafted with honesty, even the darkest subject can sparkle. In fact, I find this poem a tonic, a much-needed smile of a poem that has cheered my day better than any pharmaceutical potion ever could. As one who finds joy in rhyme herself, I thank you for lifting my spirits.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Susan. All of us — despite our differences of approach or of opinion — deeply care about genuine English poetry that adheres to traditional canons of excellence. So too does much of the Anglophone world, considering the great popularity of the SCP website. Those in the Poetry Establishment who loathe us are basically an incestuous coterie of leftish academics, editors, publishers, and grant-dispensers, all with access to money, publicity, and platforms.

      Your point about poetry having restorative powers is well taken. I would never deny that. Many persons die in abject despair whose spirits could have been raised if they knew some of the most powerful poetry. I was once at the deathbed of a professor who had lost everything — his wife, his children, most of his property, and any hope of survival. And yet he smiled at me, and recited long passages from Vergil’s Aeneid as he approached eternity.

      You know that I strongly dislike didacticism in poetry, and that I lean towards the view that poetry’s main purpose is delight and entertainment, and the dazzling of the reader with choice diction and stylistic panache. That’s the fictive mimesis that I learned from Aristotle. I love your poetry because it is in that mode. But Aristotle never said that poetry was just some cheap entertainment — he also said that it could be deeply moving, giving readers insight, catharsis, pathos, and elevation, even if its subject matter were tragic. All of those things can be healing and restorative. We have no disagreement.

      Reply
      • Susan Jarvis Bryant

        Joe, your answer has moved me, especially the story of the professor who lost everything yet drew upon his love of literature to bring him a smile in the face of despair. I believe being drawn to poetry is what makes us human. In a world where the tyrannical figures in power do their darndest to dehumanize us every day, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are priceless gifts.

  8. Paul A. Freeman

    Your poem is undoubtedly witty and well written.

    I’m not entirely onboard with the ‘rhyming verse good, free verse bad’ mantra, though. I came to the SCP because I prefer reading and writing rhyming poetry. That said, I can appreciate both types. The problem, of course, is a plethora of badly written free verse (since it’s deemed easier to write), through which you have to wade for those nuggets of gold.

    I write a lot of prose, so lyrically written free verse with extended metaphors appeals to me, and writing such pieces myself aids my storytelling.

    So imagine how shocked I was to discover that poetry in some quarters has been weaponised and politically assigned. For me, poetry is poetry, and the important thing is to recognise if it’s good or bad.

    The same is true with art. There’s a lot of laughable tripe out there which I would not even deign to call art. Turner is my favourite artist, yet his work was so revolutionary in its day, I imagine he had his detractors.

    Again, your piece is witty and well-written, which I appreciate. Thanks for posting.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you for your comments, Paul.

      I don’t condemn free verse out of hand. I have always appreciated the towering poetic strengths of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Ogden Nash, and E.E. Cummings (some of whose free verse is actually formal verse in disguise). In addition, I think some of W.E. Henley’s early verse (as in London Voluntaries) is excellent proto-free verse, and there are some writers of free verse even now who stand head and shoulders above the mob of workshop wankers who grind out poetic garbage the way meat markets grind out sausage. In addition, I write tons of blank verse — a practice which goes against the grain of some extreme rhymesters here at the SCP.

      The crucial point is this: when you are writing a satiric piece, you need to exaggerate and be unfair. That’s part of the genre. I went out of my way to lampoon and abuse free verse and its partisans in the above poem because that’s what makes any satiric poem entertaining and delightful and interesting! And any poem that is non-entertaining and non-delightful and non-interesting is a waste of both the poet’s and any potential reader’s time. The purpose of a poem is not to explicate truth, or certify an audience in its religious beliefs. A poem’s purpose is to be gem of verbal and rhetorical pyrotechnics.

      Can a good poem express an idea or support a belief or propagandize for some cause? Sure, why not? But it must only do those things as a secondary or tertiary goal. The primary goal is to BE A GOOD POEM, one that is well-crafted and slick and verbally seductive! If a reader is not verbally seduced by your poem, it doesn’t matter a whit how much “truth” you have expressed in it. Remember what the poet Don Paterson said: “A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself.”

      All of the basic debate here goes back far in time, to the Horatian mistake (repeated by endless commentators and critics) that part of a poem’s task is to teach and instruct. Some maniacs have even taken the position that a poem’s MAIN PURPOSE is to be didactic or instructive or “edifying,” and that its aesthetic elements are simply devices and baits to lure a prospective pupil into agreement with some idea or belief system or moral code.

      All of this misunderstanding goes back even before Horace, when some critics confused poetry with rhetoric. This was a disaster, because poetry and rhetoric have different aims, and different procedures. Rhetoric is designed for persuasive purposes in a courtroom setting, and is concerned with “making a case” or “defending a client” or “prosecuting a malefactor.” In other words, it uses language for an end that is not linguistic-poetic. Poetry’s aim is that of pleasure per se, without worrying about the absolute truth or falsity of what it says, as long as its verbal constructions are beautiful and attractive to readers.

      This is why I always attack meaning, message, and morals. They are nothing but legalistic rhetoric in disguise, attached to poetry as a parasite.

      Reply
  9. C.B. Anderson

    This poem embodies a message I never tire of hearing. Thomas may have had his faults, both in lifestyle and in rigorous attention to formal conventions, but he never hesitated to speak his mind. For these things alone he should be considered a major British poet. His “A Refusal to Mourn …” is one of my all-time favorite poems.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      He certainly was highly gifted as a wordsmith. His “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is unforgettable. It is a pity he died so young.

      Reply
  10. Brian Yapko

    Thank you for this insightful (and highly enjoyable) poem, Joe, which basically throws down a gauntlet concerning the aesthetics of modern poetry. The voice of the poem is fascinating as the speaker is not Dylan Thomas but a brave modern critic who is building upon Thomas and more willing to raise his voice. In other words, I would venture to say that the speaker and the poet here are one and the same as you “update” the state of poetry Dylan had once described. This is, in effect, an imaginary conversation with the aunt in the presence of Thomas. A delightful way of addressing a scholarly subject.

    Dylan Thomas serves as the springboard for an update on the state of poetry – an inspired choice of Muse since Thomas – at least for me – represents an island of craft and classical respect in an ocean of 20th Century drivel. I tend to think of him as one of the last 19th Century poets even though he wasn’t born until 1905 – much the same way I think of Rachmaninoff as a 19th Century composer even though he composed well into the 20th. Both helped keep alive a sense of beauty that was quickly disintegrating in the face of 20th Century nihilism, narcissism and the sheer entropy of discipline and form.

    There are many memorable lines in your poem. I am particularly taken by “Meterless emotions rage/And sprawl across the martyred page.” But I also love the pithiness of “we have a massive glut/Of treacly, therapeutic slop.” And I had to laugh out loud at the imagery of true poetry died and now walking vampirically, with hundreds of little journals spreading effusions of the living dead. Brilliant and pointed criticism here.

    In the end, there are many things to recoil from in modern poetry whether it be its formlessness, its gaseous vacuity or the publisher’s determination to appeal to the lowest common denominator so that even an unschooled, ungrammatical, talentless dolt can have his poetic expectorations taken seriously. But in the end, I think it is that “Massive glut of therapeutic slop” that gets on my nerves the most. Poets who think they are the first people to ever shed a tear, whose emotional state is so monumental that the entire world must share it – whether the world wants this or not. It is as if Facebook were concentrated and then spilled out into incoherent lines of prose and then reorganized into randomly divided lines to give it “gravitas” and “artfulness.”
    This lazy, self-absorbed and bloviated aesthetic is why so much modern poetry is eye-rollingly bad.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, thank you for your perceptive and appreciative comments. It was purely by chance that I came across Dylan Thomas’s epistolary poem to his aunt, and it occurred to me that I could extend his critique by writing a poem not in his voice, but in my own voice as a narrative speaker. Such a stance required the speaker to claim that “this is what your nephew WOULD have said,” thus creating a link between the two poems.

      You’re correct about Dylan’s anomalous position in the modernist movement. He was not the type to take orders from anyone trying to corral poets into prescribed groupings and ideologies. His primary loyalty was to language, first and foremost. And I think this is why there is still a strong undercurrent of affection for his work among a wide range of readers.

      Self-absorption, narcissism, and an inflated sense of entitlement are now at pandemic levels in the West, and quite inevitably it has an effect on the kind of poetry being written. If the most pleasurable thing anyone can do is take a selfie, we can’t possibly expect such persons to produce worthwhile poems.

      Reply
  11. Mary Jane Myers

    Joseph

    Are you channeling Jonathan Swift?! 36 sprightly satirical exactly-rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets! I’ve drafted several poems lamenting the “death of poetry.” Note: I think I’ll continue to shelve them—since your poem is so clearly superior to mine.

    What is especially artful is that you “continue” a 1933 poem written by Dylan Thomas who used iambic tetrameter couplets to satirize modernist poetry. He was 19 years old; the poem was not published till 1971, 18 years after his early death. Thomas was a master of formal form (think of that breathlessly perfect villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” ) But he also experimented with “free verse.” Because of his complete dedication to craft, whenever he touched paper with pen-and-ink, he turned English words into Welsh poetic gold!

    After a 4-couplet introduction, you address Dylan Thomas’s aunt: “Since then, dear aunt, it’s gotten worse….” And now you give us a spot-on catalog of the faults of contemporary so-called poetry: “And so we have a massive glut of treacly, therapeutic slop and no one knows when it will stop.” So true!

    Though this all is great fun, yet the kernel of your argument is un-comic and momentous. A living culture is nourished by excellent poetry. Our contemporary poetry is dead, and therefore our culture is moribund. You describe Thomas’s complete dedication to his art: I hear him shouting that true art eats like acid to the heart, leaves a poet a dry husk…. And the reader realizes that you also believe this, and are determined to give your whole being to the perfection of the poetic craft.

    Sincerely,
    Mary Jane

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Mary Jane, thank you most sincerely. I only wish I could come near the greatness of Swift. As someone once said, when we achieve things it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

      Excellent poetry does support a living culture, but only if it is read and enjoyed by all classes — not just jargon-spouting academics and publishers of little magazines. Yeats was amazed that the poems of Tagore were memorized and sung aloud by illiterate persons in his native India, and he wished that such could be the case with his own poems in Ireland.

      Please don’t shelve anything. Just keep on writing. I knew a long time ago that I would never be able to write as well as my grandfather. It’s still true, but I can say that I write somewhat differently from him, even if not up to his level.

      Reply
      • Brian Yapko

        FYI, that “someone* was Sir Isaac Newton. And he was humble enough to actually mean it.

  12. Adam Sedia

    I love this piece! An true essay in verse. I would compare its didactic and epistolary tone to Alexander Pope. The second stanza nicely summarizes the many faults of contemporary verse. The bad grammar and nonexistent punctuation that pervade it are one of my pet peeves.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Ah, yes — even I can be didactic at times! Satiric verse by its nature tends towards argumentation and exposition, which are inevitably embedded in any verbal assault.

      I love Alexander Pope, and many years ago I got angry in a subway station when I saw an advertisement in which four lines of Pope were quoted. Someone had scrawled a graffito next to it, which said “This isn’t real poetry! There’s no feeling and no imagery!”

      That incident was one of the many things that convinced me the mentality governing contemporary verse was diseased.

      Thank you for your comment, Adam.

      Reply

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