The Colours the Words Cast: Colour Terms in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas

“This fascinating book offers a unique perspective on Dylan Thomas’s poetry. As an exercise in the linguistic analysis of literature, it is a peerless demonstration of both the practice and value of stylistic analysis. At the same time, it is a significant addition to literary scholarship on Thomas’s poetry and is an exemplar of the level of critical detail that can be uncovered via linguistic methods.” (Dan McIntyre, Professor of English Language, Uppsala University, Sweden, co-author of Stylistics (Cambridge University Press) and Corpus Stylistics (Edinburgh University Press))

“Chris Butler and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen have provided us with an impressive linguistic and quantitative account of colour terms in the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Fascinating in its own right, it provides an invaluable resource for researchers and students studying Thomas’s poetry.” (Mick Short, Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature, University of Lancaster, UK, National Teaching Fellow and the author of Exploring the Language of Poems, Prose and Plays (Longman))

“The poetry of Dylan Thomas is among the best-known and yet least-understood of the twentieth century. Avoiding the mythology which so often distorts a just appreciation of his work, this new study of Thomas’s colour vocabulary by Christopher Butler and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen sheds a highly original light on a crucial technical aspect of the subtle ‘craft and art’ of his poems. Lucidly written and rigorously organised, it helps us to better understand just how he ‘bent the iron of English’ to his richly expressive purpose. It is a model of its kind, and can be recommended to any serious scholar of Thomas’s language.” (John Goodby, Professor of Arts and Culture, Sheffield Hallam University)

“This fascinating book offers a unique perspective on Dylan Thomas’s poetry. As an exercise in the linguistic analysis of literature, it is a peerless demonstration of both the practice and value of stylistic analysis. At the same time, it is a significant addition to literary scholarship on Thomas’s poetry and is an exemplar of the level of critical detail that can be uncovered via linguistic methods.”

—Dan McIntyre, Professor of English Language, Uppsala University, Sweden

This book examines the use of colour terms in the poetry of Dylan Thomas, adopting a linguistic and stylistic – rather than literary – approach. Although critical studies of the poetry of Dylan Thomas abound, linguistic analyses of his poems are rare. The authors investigate in detail Thomas’s use of colour terms and their connotative symbolic meanings, which form the basis for what have been called colour metaphors. The study is also a rich database which will be of use to researchers interested in the use of colour terms in other texts, whether literary or non-literary. This book will be of interest primarily to academics and advanced students in the field of linguistic stylistics.

Christopher Butler retired in 1998 from his professorial position at what is now York St John University, having previously been Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research is mainly in functional approaches to linguistic theory and description, with a particular interest in English and Spanish.

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen is Professor Emerita at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research interests include functional approaches to grammatical issues in English, with a special focus on modality, and contrastive grammar of English, French and Dutch.