Alessandro Gallenzi’s revelation of Dylan Thomas’s juvenile plagiarisms (Commentary, January 9) won’t come as much of a shock to the academic community. His efforts as a plagiarist began early. According to Andrew Lycett’s biography (Dylan Thomas: A new Life, 2003), Dylan stood up in school one day, aged seven, and recited what he called “My grave poem” – which turned out to be three lines of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
In addition to being a poet of genius and, as Gallenzi documents, an occasional plagiarist, Thomas was also a skilled and copious parodist. A number of his parodies are at the centre of The Death of the King’s Canary, the Surrealist murder mystery he co-wrote with John Davenport, which I’ve been studying for the past thirty years (for a belated PhD submission). I hope Gallenzi’s new Collected Poems also includes these and other parodies lurking in the archives.
Parody lies somewhere on a continuum between original poetry and plagiarism, but is certainly closer to the former than the latter. In a sense, all poetry plagiarizes and parodies its past. Dylan Thomas’s parodies are well worth preserving, both as evidence of the way he digested poetry, and because they continue to amuse.
Chris Zielinski
Romsey
Alessandro Gallenzi’s revelation about Dylan Thomas’s plagiarisms reminded me of an incident some years ago when I was working on a BBC Radio Four poetry programme. We had launched a competition for young poets and had chosen the prizewinners – fortunately we hadn’t broadcast the outcome – when someone felt uneasy about one of them, and research proved that it was actually a work by Brian Patten. The young prizewinner was, of course, removed from the roll of honour and we told Brian about his poem having been plagiarized. He was very forgiving and thought it all rather amusing, which is particularly impressive, as his poem had only come second.
Christine Hall
Bristol
There was a nice parallel in your podcast of January 7. First, in the extraordinary story of Dylan Thomas’s plagiarism, and the question of what it might do to readers’ perception of him (prompting this note), and second in the discussion of Franny Moyle’s Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun. It was noted that Vigée Le Brun benefited from access to paintings in her first husband’s art collection, which she had the opportunity to copy (and presumably learn from).
Both writers and visual artists may learn by copying (in writing perhaps the acceptable form is pastiche, though surely a young writer might manually copy an admired poem or story to imagine the process of creating it): the sin comes from claiming it as one’s own work. In eras when these duplications were necessarily manual (the twentieth century for Thomas, the eighteenth century for Madame Le Brun), this could be conceived as a perfectly legitimate form of training. In our own era of artificial intelligence, “trained” on the work of artists living and dead, the ethics of copying get a great deal more complicated.
My admiration for Thomas, and Vigée Le Brun, and the producers and hosts of your programme, is undimmed.
Pamela Malpas
Alameda CA
Turner and Constable
If Turner and Constable were so unalike in everything, as Ferdinand Mount writes and most agree, one must wonder what the point of the Turner and Constable blockbuster at Tate Britain is (Arts, January 9)? The clash of sensibilities jars and highlights the deficiencies rather than the merits of each, and fails to convey Turner’s greater range, which was not just as a landscape painter in oil, but also as a watercolourist, a painter of history, an illustrator, architect, poet and ready speaker on all topics of the day, whether political, scientific or culinary.
On the other hand, the conventional contrast between the backgrounds of each is not entirely right, and misses the main point of difference, that one was a town boy, the other a country boy. Both, however, came from families of tradesmen, in Turner’s case quite prosperous ones. His maternal grandfather at one time had a carriage and occupied a sizeable house. From a great-grandfather Turner was in line to inherit various properties around London, hence the unusual string of his three forenames, though he had to wait until he was forty-five for this to happen.
Besides which his maternal aunt Sarah was married to the vicar of the large parish of Tonbridge, when the vicar’s contemporary, Jane Austen’s father, held an inferior position. One of Sarah’s sons-in-law inherited a fortune and became a Deputy Lieutenant for the county of Kent. Another rented a mansion, Fanhams Hall near Ware, now a hotel.
One needs to ask what effect their situation of being the poor relations, analogous to that of Jane Austen, had on Turner’s mother and on Turner himself. Maybe Turner’s ease with the upper classes, again unlike Constable, who disliked Lord Byron and the Prince of Wales, is not so surprising.
Selby Whittingham
London SW5
Emmanuel Carrère
I very much enjoyed reading Marie Darrieussecq’s review of Emmanuel Carrère’s Kolkhoze (January 9) and I agree with her that “he is a humanist in the great French tradition”. Although she mentions Michel Houellebecq at the beginning of her piece, I was surprised she made no mention of his fine essay “Emmanuel Carrère and the problem of goodness”, published in his collection Interventions 2020 (translated into English by Andrew Brown, 2022).
Houellebecq argues there, rightly I think, that his friend grounds his work on firm moral principles, rejecting the modernist trend for relativism in ethics. For Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy the conflict of good and evil forces is apparent in the world, and ethical priorities are always clear in their minds. The same is true of Carrère’s novels. “The problem of goodness” is as important for him as “the problem of evil”. There are as many instances of kindness and generosity in the world for him as there are of brutality and selfishness. The novelist’s powers of invention should incorporate both forces, the structural balance falling on the side of good. This human quality stands to the fore in Carrère’s work. Houellebecq’s essay concludes with a quotation from Versilov, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent, which to his mind sums up Carrère’s moral stance, a quotation I think which also applies to Carrère’s ambiguous memoir of his Russian mother in Kolkhoze:
As to being obliged to make the happiness of at least one creature in the course of your life, but to do so practically, that is to say effectively, it’s something I would set up as a command for any cultivated man.
Clearly Carrère’s mother fell short of this ideal, but her negative powers of invention (the lies about having no musicians in her family, for example) have been turned to positive effect by her son.
Sam Milne
Claygate, Surrey
Wittgenstein and Lichtenberg
In his review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the age of airplanes (December 26) Nigel Warburton redeems his feeble pun (“Wittgenstein’s Critique of Pure Raisin”) by quoting Frank Ramsey’s clever quip on the famous proposition 7 of the Tractatus and one of Wittgenstein’s more annoying habits: “What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either”. This philosophical tongue-bender sent me back to the ledgers of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), who admitted, also when at a loss for words, to whistling – but only when feeling playful (“Spüre ich einen Hang zum Scherzhafften, so pfeife ich”).
It is surely Lichtenberg rather than Wittgenstein’s older contemporary Karl Kraus who deserves mention as the model for the philosopher’s aphoristic style, which characteristically throws readers back on their own thinking – indeed, Lichtenberg’s aphorisms served as precedent for generations of famous German-language writers, including Kraus himself. In one of the footnotes of his groundbreaking study Lichtenberg: A doctrine of scattered occasions (1959), J. P. Stern recorded: “[Wittgenstein] does not mention Lichtenberg’s name in the Tractatus or in the Investigations, but spoke of him to the present writer with great admiration”.
Iain Bamforth
Strasbourg, France
The Revolutionists
Richard English’s review of Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists (November 28) might have pointed out an important dimension of radical militant groups in the period 1967–83: the prominence of women in these groups. Although English names three of them – Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Leila Khaled (he could also have mentioned the women in Italy’s Brigate Rosse, such as Anna Laura Braghetti), he does not discuss the gender politics of their involvement. That may also, of course, reflect an omission in Burke’s book. English quotes Meinhof’s reference to a police officer as “a pig, not a human being” as an instance of the revolutionists’ “callous violence”. Yes, but that violence is gendered. As the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva argues in “Le Temps des femmes” (1979, translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake as “Women’s Time”, 1981), the phenomenon of women’s involvement in terrorist activities in this period can be understood as the result of the brutal exclusion of women from what she calls the “sociosymbolic contract” (the nexus of language, culture and meaning that prescribes women’s role in society). Their corresponding “counterinvestment” in terrorism can be seen as “the only means of self-defense in the struggle to safeguard an identity”. That does not excuse the violence of women in these groups, but it views their historical exclusion from the social contract as itself a form of violence that has to be reckoned with.
Ruth Evans
Saint Louis University
Stephen Sondheim
I was surprised to find in Maria Margaronis’s discussion of two Stephen Sondheim musicals (Arts, December 26, 2025) no mention of the authors of the “books” (the story and dialogue) of those musicals – George Furth (for Merrily We Roll Along) and James Lapine (for Into the Woods). Instead, they are simply attributed to “Stephen Sondheim”. Surely some of the qualities Margaronis perceives in these works should be attributed to the authors of most of the words in them?
Gregory Baruch
McLean VA
Gilles Deleuze
Peter Salmon (December 12) rightly situates the transcription and translation of Gilles Deleuze’s seminars within a wider scholarly programme of preservation and posthumous publication. However, it should be noted that, in contrast to his illustrious contemporaries, Deleuze (in Élisabeth Roudinesco’s evocative words) “spoke, without referring to notes … as if the book he carried within him were written for all time in the depths of his soul”, and crucially, his final wishes were that his corpus be confined to the material he published in his lifetime.
Undoubtedly, the efforts of those who recorded, collected, transcribed and, in the case of anglophone readers, translated Deleuze’s seminars have permanently expanded the horizons of future study; however, with formal publication, a threshold is perhaps crossed. If the vagaries of digital storage amply justify this course of action, and the “sensitive, practical and helpful philosopher” so preserved helps dispel insinuations of charlatanism (Deleuze’s appearances in the TLS here recalling those of the proverbial London bus), we trust that it is not mere pedantry that leads us to recall Deleuze’s testament, and to hope that it too enjoy an afterlife – no longer as an injunction, but as a question informing engagement with this now enriched oeuvre.
Jan Llewellyn Harris
Cardiff
Capitalism
Only in a review by a professor of history of a book titled Capitalism could the phrase “free enterprise” fail to appear (Harold James on Sven Beckert, December 26). Capitalism is not a system, an ideology, or a movement. It is a term used to describe a phenomenon whereby entrepreneurs collect enough capital to launch a business, and then try to repay those who invested in them. Yet it is not a recipe for success, let alone for creating a monopoly. Some entrepreneurs lose all their savings. Some try again. Some do not. Some will be very successful. Others may not be able to handle competition.
I wonder what all these analysts of “late-stage capitalism” think will replace it. Communism? I doubt it. And I wonder what these academics imagine will fund their tenured positions and their pensions. Think of that arch fellow-traveller A. J. P. Taylor counting his dividends in the evenings.
Antony Percy
Southport NC
Herrings
Pablo Scheffer (January 9) says: “Surprising herringists include Benjamin Britten and Laurence Olivier”. Britten was born and bred in Lowestoft, which, after Great Yarmouth, had the second biggest herring fleet in Britain until the early 1970s, when the herring fisheries collapsed owing to overfishing, so his herringism isn’t all that surprising. I was puzzled that Scheffer’s review of Rigby’s Encyclopedia of the Herring made no mention of the east coast herring industry, one of the biggest employers in the area for many years, and its dramatic demise. Anyone interested in the history of herring fishing could do worse than visit Great Yarmouth’s herring museum.
Peter Bendall
Cambridge
On Pedantry
Lucio Fumi (Letters, December 26) wonders what the rationale is behind the common misuse “the data is” etc. The answer is ignorance, following the demise of the teaching of Latin in schools. Ignorance is also the cause of the misuse of the genitive apostrophe “s” when applied to the titles of books, journals etc which are normally printed in italic. So instead of the correct Bleak House’s we are given Bleak House’s, as if the genitive is somehow independent of the noun it qualifies, whereas in fact it is an integral part of the noun, derived from the Middle English genitive form “es”, as in Chaucer – “Christes gospel”. Ignorance in this case is presumably due to the decline of Middle English in university English departments. Like “data” used in the singular, it is now universal, even in the pages of the TLS, and no doubt ineradicable.
John Barnie
Comins Coch, Ceredigion
The post Dylan Thomas’s plagiarism appeared first on TLS.