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British Romanticism

Despite living and writing in the middle of the twentieth century, Thomas was powerfully influenced by the British Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “And death shall have no dominion” reflects this influence in several ways. For one thing, British Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley all wrote in a highly lyrical mode. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular, revived an older tradition of lyric poetry. Significantly, they rejected the elevated diction of neoclassical poetry and privileged simpler, more natural language. Instead of focusing on verbal pyrotechnics or excessively complicated syntax, they cultivated subtler forms of linguistic beauty that show up, for instance, in Thomas’s masterful use of assonance and consonance. Additionally, Thomas was influenced by the powerful cosmic and theological visions penned by the poet and visual artist, William Blake. Blake is perhaps best known for the invocation of eternity that opens his great poem, “Auguries of Innocence” (ca. 1803):

         To see a World in a Grain of Sand
         And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
         Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
         And Eternity in an hour

Thomas follows Blake’s example, particularly in the final stanza of “And death shall have no dominion,” where the speaker envisions the skeletons of dead men floating in the cosmic void, with “stars at elbow and foot” (line 5).

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