SOURCE: Schwarz, Daniel R. “‘And the Wild Wings Were Raised’: Sources and Meaning in Dylan Thomas' ‘A Winter's Tale.’” Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 1 (spring 1979): 85-98.

In the following essay, Schwarz discusses “A Winter's Tale,” maintaining that the poem was written within the tradition of Romanticism, as well as in response to that tradition.

Dylan Thomas' “A Winter's Tale” (1945), perhaps his greatest work, is a poem that is central to our understanding of how the Romantic tradition perseveres in twentieth-century British poetry as an alternative to the political consciousness of the Auden generation. If Thomas had only written the great poems that emerged from the shadow of the Second World War, such as “Poem in October,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” and “A Winter's Tale,” he would be entitled to rank behind only...