Abstract: John Goodby, Professor of College of Art and Humanities, Swansea University, U.K, is the Director of Dylan Thomas Research Center and the world authority on Dylan Thomas. Since 2001, he has published four books on Dylan Thomas research, including Dylan Thomas: A New Casebook(2001), The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall(2013), The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas(2014), Discovering Dylan Thomas: a Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems(2017). Funded by High-end Foreign Experts Project of State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of China, Professor Goodby was invited to deliver a series of lectures on the topics of Dylan Thomas and Welsh literature in Tianjin University of Technology from 2nd September to 1st October. During his visit, Dr. Pu Haifeng interviewed him on the issues concerning Thomas' position in west literature and the reception, Welshness and process poetic of his poetry. Professor Goodby argued that Dylan Thomas is a poet with the equivalent reputation to Auden in the 1930s and 1940s. Although he lived in Wales, he was influenced more by the British literary tradition. Before 1970s, critics even put his poetry into the canonical category, but excluded him out of the mainstream to the advantage of the anti-modernist poetry after that. So after the centenary of his birth in 2014, there was a tendency toward reinterpretation of Thomas' position in the west. With respect to Welshness, Professor contended that Swansea's cultural, linguistic, and topographical otherness from London gave the unique poetic voice to his poetry; his process poetic was influenced by pantheism as well as the theories proposed by Whitehead, Einstein, Darwin and Freud.

Key words: Dylan Thomas, Welshness, Process poetic, Bardic tradition