ABSTRACT
All critics seem to agree that there is something historic, or inaugural, about this text. ‘This poem made Thomas famous’, writes Tindall (1962:38). ‘This is the poem that started Thomas on his way’, says Emery (1971:269). Both critics reflect the recollections of William Empson, written shortly after Dylan Thomas’s death, of the context and circumstances of the poem’s first publication in 1934. The political poets of the early 1930s (Auden, Day Lewis, Spender, to name the most fashionable) had already succeeded in making ‘myths of themselves and of each other’, as MacNeice was to remark as early as 1935 (MacNeice 1987:35). Thomas would then, on certain occasions, have been prepared to declare that he shared the same socialist ideal,1 but he was not interested in wr iting about politics. Empson remembered the circumstances well:
What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing ‘The force that through the green fuse’ as a pr ize poem in the Sunday Referee, and from that day he was a famous poet; I think the incident does some credit to the town, making it look less clumsy than you would think. The poem is more easily analysable than most early Dylan Thomas poems, and we need not doubt that the choosers knew broadly what it meant (I would not claim to know all myself); but it was very off the current fashion.
