Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

Abstract

It was, of course, the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog stories, written in Laugharne in the years immediately preceding the war, that signalled Dylan Thomas’s real emergence as a master of prose. They mark Dylan Thomas’s discovery that his vein of comedy, already present in his letters and the school magazine parodies, could prove a new and significant means of expression. The composition, early in 1938, of the first of these stories, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, a lively tale with its already assured and distinctive blend of pathos and comedy and its vivid Carmarthenshire settings seen through the innocent but acute observation of the child, was decisive in Thomas’s growth as a prose writer. From this point the jester and entertainer in the poet’s personality, largely absent in the high seriousness of his best verse, had discovered a role in literature, a role where the poet’s gift for comedy was enriched by a piercing nostalgia and that haunting perception of mutability and death that veined his poetry. Elements of personal recollection vivified by Thomas’s flair for dramatic presentation and precision of style no doubt directed the poet’s newly acquired control of narrative.