Very well done, indeed, Henry - this piece is brilliant. I think I agree with all you say about Dylan Thomas. I remember DT once described himself as being "At the top of the second division" but perhaps he was being too modest. Larkin is great favourite of mine, but he and DT are so dissimilar that I cannot conceive of one of them being "better" than the other, any more than a pomegranate is better than a parnsip.
The critic Bernard Levin once said that if he were infinitely more talented, he could imagine himself as Beethoven, but he could never imagine himself as a Schubert, who was too individualistic to be duplicated. And where would Larkin's lugubrious glumness be without a Dylan Thomas to set it off against? Gloom and fear of death are all very well in their way, but we need to be reminded of the life-force too, and Dylan Thomas, for all his playacting and obscurity and "nogood boyo" antics, did this so well. Practising poets are, for obvious reasons, more interested in finding poets who make good models than good poets who are impossible models, and this may be one reason for DT's relatively low stock among poets.
Interestingly there are 490 books by or about Thomas on Amazon UK as opposed to 167 by or about Larkin, so DT must be popular with someone - the general public? Well, that can't be bad either.
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