Life & Wisdom Quote by Dylan Thomas

Upright is a deceptively physical word for a poet to wield: it conjures spine, balance, and refusal, as if artistry were less a temperament than a stance you either keep or lose. Dylan Thomas isn’t praising politeness or moral hygiene here. He’s drawing a line between the artist as ornament and the artist as someone who won’t be bent into a convenient shape - by patrons, by politics, by fashion, or by the artist’s own appetite for applause.

The intent is almost combative. “Only one position” shuts down romantic wiggle room: no lounging in cynicism, no kneeling to respectability, no crawling toward trends. Upright reads as integrity, but also as alertness - the artist as a kind of human antenna, standing to receive and transmit. It’s an ethic of attention.

The subtext gets sharper given Thomas’s era and persona. Writing through the churn of interwar modernism and World War II’s aftermath, he watched language conscripted into slogans, morale, and propaganda. “Upright” becomes a defense of the lyric imagination against the flattening pressures of public rhetoric. At the same time, it’s hard not to hear self-address in it: Thomas, mythologized for his hard living, insisting that the artist’s job isn’t to behave well but to remain unbroken, to keep faith with the work even when the life is messy.

It works because it’s bodily and uncompromising. A single word turns aesthetics into posture, and posture into resistance. The artist, Thomas suggests, doesn’t get a throne or a pedestal - just the chance to stand.