Yet as Thomas's closest childhood friend, Dr. Daniel Jones, said, Thomas's artistic sensibility was at war with his outer life. In Thomas's words, there was a traditional romantic conflict between the "interior world" of childhood fantasy, dream, poetic imagination and the "exterior, wrong world" of objective, adult reality, what Thomas fearfully called "the world-of-the-others."
Not only Thomas's life but even his poetry is dominated by the problem of the relation of inner and outer, of self and world. In a letter of 1933, written during the single greatest year of Thomas's poetic activity, the eighteen-year-old poet speculated about this troubling matter of "worlds": "Perhaps the greatest works of art are those that reconcile, perfectly, inner and outer." This problem remains the underlying theme of Thomas's poetry in its three major phases: (1) the early juvenilia, the poems in the notebooks, and the post-notebook poems of 1934-1936; (2) the middle-phase poetry of the late 1930s to mid-1940s; and (3) the final poetry of the postwar years (1946-1953).
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