Liberating Dylan Thomas

Throughout the history of Thomas’s critical reception, psychoanalytic interpretations have been applied that have privileged the psychosexual over the psycho-linguistic elements of his work. The wealth of sexual and pseudo-sexual imagery has acquired a negative charge, and has been used to evidence claims that Thomas was the epiphon of his own disturbed psyche, thus reducing the poetry to the expression of the poet’s schizoid neuroses. Avoiding the biography-based approaches that have dominated