Wit & Attitude Quote by Dylan Thomas

Thomas barrels in with a grin and a raised fist: yes, the poems are messy, and yes, that mess is the point. “Crudities, doubts, and confusions” reads like preemptive damage control, but it’s also a manifesto against the polished piety of “nice” verse. He’s blessing the imperfections before critics can weaponize them. Thomas knew his work could feel overheated, knotted, even willfully obscure; he turns that liability into a claim of honesty. If human experience is raw and contradictory, why shouldn’t the poems be?

The clever hinge is the double devotion: “for the love of Man and in praise of God.” He refuses the modern neat split between secular humanism and religious awe, insisting they’re entangled. In Thomas’s world, the body and the divine are not enemies; they’re co-conspirators. That’s why the line lands: it frames poetry as an act of fidelity to two immensities at once, the mortal and the cosmic, without pretending either is simple.

Then the punchline: “and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.” It’s bravado as theology. The swear breaks the sanctimony, dragging “praise of God” back into a barroom register, where belief is less a sermon than a stubborn, half-laughed conviction. Subtext: don’t mistake my excess for emptiness. Contextually, it’s Thomas staking out his stance in a mid-century literary climate suspicious of grand spiritual language, daring you to call him sentimental while he beats you to the insult.