Poem pincher / Who cares if Dylan Thomas was a plagiarist? |
‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’ This quote from TS Eliot has become a critical commonplace. And if we’re to take it as the truth, the young Dylan Thomas was even more precocious than we had previously realised. An academic at work on a complete collection of Thomas’s poetic output has discovered at least a dozen instances, dating from even before Thomas’s teens, of his publishing poems by other people under his own name.
The schoolboy Thomas obviously already had an ear, and he used it to steal light verse from Punch
Having tracked down thirty poems the young Thomas contributed to his school paper, Alessandro Gallenzi said that Thomas ‘plagiarised several of the poems he published under his name in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine. He had not simply drawn inspiration from other texts, imitated or parodied them, as he later claimed: he had stolen the work of other authors wholesale, at times changing the title or a few words, perhaps to dodge detection.’
Here, then, was an immature poet who stole. It’s quite the discovery – though discovering that Dylan Thomas was a bit of a rogue may not come as a surprise to those familiar with his life and behaviour.........