Life & Wisdom Quote by Dylan Thomas

America, in Dylan Thomas's telling, is less a nation of readers than a nation of crowds: eager, noisy, perpetually ready to be thrilled by whatever rolls into town next. The line is funny because it punctures the romantic myth of the poetry tour. Thomas isn't describing a reverent literary public; he's describing a hungry auditorium that will cheer for "ranting poems" with the same gusto it cheered last week's earnest talk on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. The joke lands on the whiplash of those topics: infrastructure, niche scholarship, then lyrical incantation - all filed under the same category of entertainment.

The word "ranting" is doing quiet work. It's self-mocking, hinting that the performances were closer to showmanship than to delicate reading. Thomas, famously charismatic and famously self-destructive on his U.S. tours, understood that the poet in mid-century America often had to function as a traveling act, packaging intensity as a product. The audience isn't condemned so much as revealed: their enthusiasm is real, but it's promiscuous.

Subtext-wise, Thomas is also taking a swipe at cultural seriousness. When everyone is "equally enthusiastic" about anything, enthusiasm stops being a judgment and becomes a habit. That flattens distinctions between art and information, between revelation and a PowerPoint before PowerPoint. The line catches the uneasy bargain of mass culture: poetry gets heard, even adored, but at the price of being consumed like a novelty lecture - one more ticketed event in a restless, curious republic.