In the late summer of 1940 Dylan Thomas travelled from Laugharne to London – and was caught in one of the first major bombing attacks from the Luftwaffe. He reported the experience, and the psychic shock-waves it sent out, in a letter to his friend Vernon Watkins:

This is an initial and partial report from a city undergoing bombing – but also a self-examination of the fears that bombing brought in the 1940s. It combines touches of popular surrealism (the animated taxis with fearful faces) with real faces being shaved (signs of apparent normality). Moreover, it marks the start of Thomas's engagement with the war as brute actuality rather than a dreaded future, and the difficulties inherent in thus writing of and from such destruction. He did ‘settle down’ to writing poems again before too long. They were, in their different ways, both ‘nightmarish’ and yet replete with possibilities of how lyric poetry could engage with the specifics of industrialised warfare. This chapter situates these Second World War works in a comparative context, reading them alongside the art of one of Thomas's contemporaries. Such a move shows the multiple analogies between both aesthetic fields, but also reveals that a different model of understanding this specific visual and literary relationship might be possible.

The artist Ceri Geraldus Richards was born in Dunvant, a small village on the Gower Peninsula 5 miles west of Swansea, in 1903.