‘Once Below a Time.’ Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’: An Aesthetic of Nostalgia and Nostalgia for an Aesthetic
After considering the history of the notion of nostalgia from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries—notably its development from a painful disease to what is perceived by the present doxa as a self-indulgent emotion and aesthetic facility, the article concentrates on ‘Fern Hill’, a poem i...
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| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Autor Principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | After considering the history of the notion of nostalgia from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries—notably its development from a painful disease to what is perceived by the present doxa as a self-indulgent emotion and aesthetic facility, the article concentrates on ‘Fern Hill’, a poem in which nostalgia is seen as a ‘difficult’ condition, profoundly energised by the tensions generated in the complex dialogue between presence and absence, between on the one hand a distressing form of melancholia and on the other a paradoxically successful ‘recall’ of joy. The poem is also perceived as emblematic in that twentieth century criticism has been troubled, precisely, by its ‘abuse’ of ‘nostalgia’. The second part of the article looks to place the poem in the context of neo-Romanticism—the renewed interest in Romanticism of the late thirties and forties of the last century and examines Thomas’s deployment of a vision of time and a reincarnation of the Beulah that one finds in Blake and Samuel Palmer. Though insisting that neo-Romanticism is not Romanticism, the article attempts to show that to understand this particular avatar of nostalgia the reader has to be at least aware of the type of aesthetic and intellectual priorities that one finds, for example in the theoretical writings of Schiller where ‘nostalgic’ visions of childhood are auguries of an innocence to come. |
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