"Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction"
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Thomas is confessing a poet's most embarrassing truth: presentation can masquerade as authority, and we all fall for it. The line starts as a disarming plea for mercy - don't judge the poems yet - but quickly pivots into a sly diagnosis of how art gets taken seriously. Typescript, that crisp machinery of letters, doesn't just record a poem; it stages it. Once words are neatly aligned, the page performs confidence on their behalf.
The joke is that "certainty" is manufactured. A draft in handwriting admits contingency: cross-outs, hesitations, the visible evidence of a mind changing its mind. Typed, even a weak line looks like it has passed some tribunal. Thomas is teasing the reader's bias (and his own): we equate clean form with finished thought. He knows that a poem can acquire "conviction" simply by losing the marks of doubt.
There's also self-protective cunning here. If the poem is good, the typescript helps it land with the full force he intends; if it's bad, it will be bad "with conviction" - a kind of aesthetic dignity, a clear failure rather than a muddled maybe. That duality fits Thomas's era, when the typewriter was becoming a bridge between private lyric mess and public literary object, and when poets were increasingly enmeshed in editors, submissions, and the professionalization of voice. Under the wit is a quiet anxiety: not just about making poems, but about making them look like they deserve to exist.
The joke is that "certainty" is manufactured. A draft in handwriting admits contingency: cross-outs, hesitations, the visible evidence of a mind changing its mind. Typed, even a weak line looks like it has passed some tribunal. Thomas is teasing the reader's bias (and his own): we equate clean form with finished thought. He knows that a poem can acquire "conviction" simply by losing the marks of doubt.
There's also self-protective cunning here. If the poem is good, the typescript helps it land with the full force he intends; if it's bad, it will be bad "with conviction" - a kind of aesthetic dignity, a clear failure rather than a muddled maybe. That duality fits Thomas's era, when the typewriter was becoming a bridge between private lyric mess and public literary object, and when poets were increasingly enmeshed in editors, submissions, and the professionalization of voice. Under the wit is a quiet anxiety: not just about making poems, but about making them look like they deserve to exist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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