Abstract

Dylan Thomas made his name with one particular poem, ‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’, which he wrote and published in his teens. Not only the theme but also the imagery in detail is too close to certain passages in Schopenhauer for a coincidence to be likely. It is more probable that there was some influence. This is made more likely by the fact that there are good reasons to believe that the young Thomas had read a book called Thomas Hardy's Universe, by Ernest Brennecke, which contains many quotations from Schopenhauer, including, in its first chapter, the one closest to Thomas's poem.