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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Blogger

February 28, 2007

How would one portray Dylan Thomas as a young blogger, and a Welsh blogger to boot ?

Now there’s a thought. How would he fare ? He’d probably ruffle a few feathers, but then blogs can be a rough medium.

In his radio broadcast entitled “Wales and the Artist” (broadcast 24th October 1949. BBC. Welsh Home Service. Produced by John Griffiths) Dylan Thomas offered some insights on the Welsh Artist. He certainly ruffled a few feathers in this broadcast.

By 1949 Dylan Thomas was a mature poet, and he had been working on his play Under Milk Wood for at least four years. He would continue to work on this play for another four years, until his early death in 1953.

Dylan Thomas writes :

“Too many of the artists of Wales who go to live permanently in, for example, London, begin almost at once to anglicize themselves beyond recognition (though this, of course, does not apply to artists alone [...])… They repudiate the Welsh language, whether they know it or not. By the condescending telling of comic apocryphal tales about Dai and Evan from the valleys, they earn, in the company of cultural lickspittles who condescend to them in their turn, sorry dinners and rounds of flat drinks… They confirm, by their spaniel aduration and their ignorance of the tradition that inevitably leads to the experiment, the suspicions of un-Welsh experimental artists that all the Welsh are humbugs, especially Welsh artists… They set up, in grey, whining London, a little mock Wales of their own, an exile government of dispossessed intellectuals dispossessed not of their country but of their intellects. And they return home, every long now and then, like slummers, airily to treat and backslap their grooved old friends, to inquire, half-laughingly, the whereabouts of streets and buildings as though they did not know them in the deepest dark, to drag, with all the magnets of their snobbery, the Christian names and numbers of wives of aged painters, the haunts of up-and-going poets, the intimate behaviour of the famous musicians whom they have not met, and to jingle in their pockets and mouths their foreign-made pennies, opinions, and intonations.

On the other hand, too many of the artists of Wales stay in Wales too long… rather than attempting to raise the standard of art of their own country by working fervently at their own words, paint, or music.

And too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of the artists of Wales.

There is only position for an artist anywhere : and that is, upright“

[Note : the ellipses have been added to shorten the text; the emphasis is ours]

Of course, Dylan Thomas would make a fine blogger-cum-poet and his advice and comments on artists sixty years ago rings true today for Welsh artists and bloggers!

Photographs : Dylan Thomas statue in Swansea Marina. 1984. Sculptor John Doubleday.

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