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'"Shot from the locks": Poetry, Mourning, "Deaths and Entrances"'
Steven Vine
Swansea University Author: Steven Vine
Abstract
The essay examines Thomas’s 1946 collection 'Deaths and Entrances' in relation to the themes of mourning and elegy in that volume. Beginning with the imagery of locks and keys which figure in the Blitz poems, it argues that Thomas’s poetry lies both within and beyond the elegiac modes of t...
| Published: |
Palgrave
Basingstoke
2001
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa17982 |
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| Abstract: |
The essay examines Thomas’s 1946 collection 'Deaths and Entrances' in relation to the themes of mourning and elegy in that volume. Beginning with the imagery of locks and keys which figure in the Blitz poems, it argues that Thomas’s poetry lies both within and beyond the elegiac modes of twentieth-century poetry, audaciously replacing conventional lament with ‘a language of celebration that parodically compounds irony with affirmation.’ In refusing to mourn, these poems heighten already existing strategies from Thomas’s earlier poetry and explore the ‘entrance’ of death as a traumatic event into the poetic text. Thomas is aware of his own implication in war; for example, in the collection’s title poem, the speaker shares an occult identity not only with the victims of the air-raid, but also with the Luftwaffe bomber pilot. The essay considers a group of poems that deal with the complexities and anxieties of symbolising or ‘mourning’ death’s catastrophic entrances. Drawing on ideas of mourning and symbolisation in psychoanalysis, it suggests that death, as an invasive ‘other,’ inhabits the way Thomas thinks about the very production of poetry, and that his labour of poetic writing can be understood as a continual performance of ‘deaths and entrances.’ |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |