Dylan Thomas came of age at the height of the Modernist era when English-language poetry was largely defined by its commitment to tackling difficult social and cultural issues. The role of the poet, embodied most notably by towering figures such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden, was regarded as being a provocative commentator, an outsider looking with concern at the world. Alarmed by first the brutalities of World War I, the economic catastrophe of global Depression, and the steady spread of industrialization with its threat of dehumanization, these poets brought intellectual vigor, brittle wit, and cutting irony and cynicism to their perception of civilization’s collapse.

By contrast, Thomas, influenced by the soaring, often intoxicating lyricism of the Romantics, returns poetry to this early 19th-century model. Poets, he argues in this poem, are mavericks who seek to record the experiences of the heart—its agonies and its triumphs. They should not seek material success or personal laurels; rather, they should retain the purity that comes with complete obscurity. The poem is a-temporal, in that it does not speak to its era—Thomas ignores World War II, the collapse of fascism, and the explosive revelation of the new power of atomic weaponry.