SOURCE: “Prose and Drama,” in Dylan Thomas, Neville Spearman, 1954, pp. 155–88.

In the excerpt below, Stanford describes Thomas's provocative use of language in the stories of Map of Love and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

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The seven stories in The Map of Love exhibit a typical young man's prose: not the prose of a young poet writing about poetry, but that of a poet using prose to convey what he has generally expressed in verse. (Remove the formal device of narrative and the tales in The Map of Love might all have been poems from that or previous volumes.) The value of these first stories, I should say, is that of Yeats' early stories. We read them, in retrospect, because they are the work of a fine poet, rather than because they succeed in themselves. But taken as a part of the poet's imaginary world...