WALK #14
VOID & VOICE | DYLAN THOMAS TO SYLVIA PLATH
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Dylan Thomas described the basement flat at 54 Delancey Street, Camden as his ”London house of horror” perhaps because he was spiralling into ill-health during his time here, perhaps because it represented detachment from home and poetry. It’s where he stayed for work, or rather where he came to earn money from broadcast and appearance. Poetry is made in the dark but it needs the light to live. If the lights are too bright, though, it dies.
Delancey Street was a halfway house between worlds, between Wales and London, between poetry and performance, between private life and public voice. Dylan Thomas lived here shortly before his final trip to the bright lights of New York where he died of American charity.
Poet Charlotte Mew lived on this same street, a few doors up and two decades before Thomas. Her house is no longer there, it is marked by an absence, by empty space, disappeared like so many women of the literary canon.
I was joined on this walk by Naomi Foyle as we made pilgrimage through Regents Park, to Primrose Hill and on to the boyhood home of W.B. Yeats where Sylvia Plath ended her life. Plath’s plaque, though, is found on another property just around the corner, a house where she lived rather than died. As with Thomas it is often the drama and tragedy of her death that casts a shadow across the brilliance of her work.
Before we reached the Plath house we took a detour to the Shakespeare Oak, a tree planted for the poet’s tricentenary by the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee. In 1864 100,000 people descend on Primrose Hill for the occasion, for the planting of a tree, to reclaim the poet for the people. You can read more about it in my Substack essay here.
