17 pages • 34 minutes read
In My Craft or Sullen Art
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Background
Literary Context: Ars Poetica Genre
Ars poetica—Latin for “the poetic art”—is a genre of poetry that addresses the process of writing verse. Writing poems about writing poems dates back to the Latin lyric poet Horace (65 BCE-8 BCE). The genre actually takes its name from his towering poem “Ars Poetica” (19 BCE), Latin for “The Art of Poetry.” Over time, poets as varied as Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Ezra Pound have examined in verse the process of writing poetry itself.
In the ars poetica tradition, poets examine the rewards and agonies of writing and the delight and surprise they find in crafting poems. These poems are not how-to manuals that offer writerly advice, but instead they pull back the curtain to hint at how a poem comes into being to capture the complexity of human experience.
In “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” Dylan Thomas reveals how and under what circumstances he writes poetry. Dismissing motivations like fame, money, self-promotion, and immortality, he instead imagines his ideal readers as lovers who are quite possibly unaware of his existence—a contradiction that goes against traditional expectations of poetic purpose.
Cultural Context: The Bardic Poet Tradition
By describing his poem as written by the “singing light” (Line 6) of a raging moon, and dedicating it to those who in their intense lovemaking wrap their arms around “the griefs of the ages” (Line 18), Thomas relies on grandeur to evoke the Celtic cultural tradition of the Bardic poet that dates to the 12th century. In this myth-making approach, bards became sublime spiritual figures who claimed to possess mystical powers; they boasted a social outsider status that enabled them to be observers, isolated them, and gave them access to aspects of the cosmos unavailable to the rest of humanity.
Thomas acknowledged being influenced by two modern poets who similarly drew on the Bardic tradition: American Romantic poet Walt Whitman and the Irish mystic poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. All three viewed the poet as a public figure—a Bard whose role is to connect the human to the sublime, bypassing convention and the day-to-day. Like a prophet, The Bard looks to a wider horizon and, in turn, elevates the ordinary world in which the rest of us live.
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By Dylan Thomas
