The Waste Land Dylan Thomas Analysis

my dialectical method, as I understand it , is a constant building up and breaking up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time… Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of the creative, re creative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war—I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem. (Dylan Thomas, Letter to Treece 157-158)
The whole passage shows that Dylan Thomas’ “dialectical method” is absolute submitted to what Conquest calls “subjective moods.” The Movement’s faith in rational order amidst poetic chaos is understandable. Poets of Thomas’ persuasion believe that their task is

The poem moves forward by the flow of thought. Davie introduces quotations but they are strictly subordinated to the thought and have no meaning or emotional significance in themselves, as they would have in a poem by Eliot or Pound. There is a controlled release of feeling, for the poem is “heart-felt,” not literary, in the last two lines but it has been worked for. The overall impression is one of restraint, urbanity of sincerity.
If this technique is compared to the technique in Eliot’s The Wasteland one can understand clearly the relevance of Movement’s post-war return to “rules” of English. The sudden shifts of tone and style, of mood and movement the reader experiences in The Wasteland and the problems he encounters in the quotations and allusions, will call for quite an effort of attunement on his part.
The Movement writers were in rejection of the magnificent themes of modernist poetry. They were concerned with day to day experiences like working in an office, journeying by train, visiting college years after graduating and playing cards. There are very few works like “A Song about Major Eatherley” directly concerned with war. Roger Day expressed his discrimination of the Movement writers against modernist poetry and comments on the poetry of Larkin in this reference: “Larkin writes about places and situations which are familiar to most people” (Day 11).