'Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice': Dylan Thomas and Irish writers

Join the Institute of Irish Studies for a talk by Dylan Thomas expert Professor John Goodby (Professor of Arts and Culture, Sheffield Hallam University) and excerpts from Stan Tracey's Jazz Suite Inspired by Under Milk Wood by pianist Richard Wetherall with narration by Seamus Lavan. The evening will conclude with a wine reception, during which John Goodby will sign copies of his co-authored biography Dylan Thomas (Critical Lives).

'Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice': Dylan Thomas and Irish writers

In a review of 1934, the youthful Dylan Thomas claimed: 'The true future of English poetry, poetry that that can be ... read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries. ... Wales [and] Ireland ... are building up a poetry that is as serious and genuine as the poetry in Mr Pound's Active Anthology'.

Like the work of the Irish writers he admired - he thought W. B. Yeats 'the greatest modern poet', while James Joyce was the single biggest influence on his style - Thomas exemplifies the way in which writers of the 1920s and 1930s from the so-called margins wrote back to the centre, deploying modernist experiment, linguistic excess, parody, and surrealism to undermine metropolitan pretensions to authority.

Married to Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of Yeats's friend, the minor poet Francis Macnamara, Thomas also enjoyed many material and familial contact with Ireland, which he visited in 1935 and 1946, while traces of his literary influence and personality can be found in the work of poets as varied as Medbh McGuckian and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the 'Belfast Group' of the 1960s - Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.

This talk will address this little-known web of influence and impact, with a primary focus on Thomas's debt to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a title he mischievously purloined for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as well as the Yeatsian models for his early short stories and poems such as 'In my craft and sullen art'. It will also touch on the apparently stark differences between his famous radio work, Under Milk Wood, and those by Samuel Beckett, such as All That Fall.

John Goodby is Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. His research specialisms are Irish writing, Welsh poetry, and British / US poetry, especially modernist poetry, more broadly. He is the leading authority on the work of Dylan Thomas and the author / editor of five books on the subject, including Collected Poems (2014). In this capacity he has worked with and as a consultant to the BBC, the Arts Council, the National Trust, Aardman Films, the OU, the British Library, British Council, etc. He is also a poet and translator of poetry (to date, from Italian, French, and German), with a strong interest in non-anglophone poetries. He has an interest in the visual arts and modern art music, and this is reflected in several collaborations with composers and artists. As an active arts organiser, he has organised poetry festivals, edited poetry anthologies and magazines, run a poetry press, and curated and presented poetry reading series.

Richard Wetherall has been working as a pianist for 25 years in which time he has played with jazz musicians Richard Iles, Bobby Wellins and Mark Nightingale. He has toured worldwide with Casablanca Steps and Dominic Halpin and the Honey B’s including supporting Tony Bennett and his quartet in Halifax, Canada. He has taught in various institutions including LIPA, Manchester University and Chetham’s Piano Summer School. He accompanies two Music Place choirs as well as the Vibrant Voices Choir (for people living with dementia).

Seamus Lavan is an actor and theatre-maker. He graduated from Oxford University in 2017, where he studied English. He then trained for two years at the Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
He has performed on both screen and stage in projects that include short films, fashion campaigns, music videos, and an outdoor production of Henry V in Florence scored by a full, live orchestra.
After graduating from Lecoq, he started a theatre company called BRILLIG with some of his classmates. They recently finished devising their first show, Terry’s – a cabaret set in a 1990s US car dealership. They will take this to the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringes later this year, before doing a national tour.
He is also developing a solo piece based on Julius Caesar’s long-lost TED talk on leadership mindset. This should be finished in the autumn.

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