22 Dylan Thomas

Dr. Sushil Kumar

About the Author

Dylan Thomas was born at in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glam organ, Wales, on 27 October 1914. (image 2) Uplands was, one of the more affluent place of the city which kept him away from the industrial areas. His father D.J. Thomas was a senior teacher of English at Swansea grammar School and he was regarded as a scholar of Shakespeare. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas’s sister, was nine years elder to him. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife was both bilingual in English and Welsh.

His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts’ Carmar then shire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea was an inspiration for some of his work, like many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas’s formal education began at Mrs. Hole’s Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent.

In his last school years at sixteen Thomas began to contribute articles to a local newspaper called the “Herald of Wales”. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), In 1934, he moved to London where he met Pamela Handsford Johnson who was an author. She became his girl friend whom he expected to marry. But the love affairs could not consummate in the permanent alliance of marriage. In 1937 Thomas married Caitlin Mac Namara (image 3) whom he had met a year before. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939 (d. 2000). Their daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, was born on 3 March 1943. The second son, Colm Garan Hart, (image 4)was born on 24 July 1949. During the Second World War, Thomas did a great deal of work for the British Broadcasting Corporation and earned reputation of a first grade radio announcer and verse reader. By this time he had become an addict to liquor and Caitlin is rumoured to have had extramarital affairs, even with colleagues and friends of Thomas.

Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, and narrated, with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In , “Quite Early One Morning,” he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).

In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while  in  Florence,  he  wrote In  Country  Sleep,  And  Other  Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem; “Do not go gentle into that good night”. When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, and Thomas’s scripts, “Me and My Bike,” “Rebecca’s Daughters,” and “The Beach at Falesa,” were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Film scripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).

In 1950, Thomas announced that he would immigrate to the United States because he thought he would be paid better there than in England. He settled in New York where he recited his works, and was profoundly admired. Nevertheless, the money he earned was spent on alcohol, which led his married life into a serious crisis. On November 9, 1953, he died after a heavy drinking binge in a Manhattan hotel, at the age of 39. Later, Thomas’s body was brought “home” to Wales. He was buried at St. Martin’s Church in Langhorne.

The former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, one of Dylan Thomas’s many noteworthy fans, campaigned for Thomas to be commemorated at “Poet’s Corner”, within London’s Westminster Abbey. In 1995, President Carter opened the Dylan Thomas Centre (the National Literature Centre of Wales) in Swansea, the first literary powerhouse in the U.K. The Dylan Thomas

Theatre and was the first Little Theatre in Wales (see image 5). The centre is the focus for an annual Dylan Thomas Festival, which celebrates the life and works of one of the city’s most notable son. Swansea is also home to the Dylan Thomas Theatre and his bronze statue literally sits nearby

2.Major Contributions

Dylan Thomas’ first poem was published in the school’s magazine. He later became its editor. he began keeping poetry notebooks (image 6)and amassed 200 poems in four journals between 1930 and 1934. It is often commented that Thomas was indulged like a child and he was, in fact, still a teenager when he published many of the poems he would become famous for: “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” “Before I Knocked” and “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”. “And Death shall have no Dominion”, appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933 and further work appeared in The Listener in 1934 ,caught the attention of two of the most senior poets of the day, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. His highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published on 18 December 1934, and went on to win a contest run by The Sunday Referee, giving him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, which did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves.

Eighteen Poems was published in December, 1934, a short time after Thomas moved to London. The volume received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably. Ferris quoted from an anonymous review in the Morning Post that called the poems “individual but not private” and went on to strike a note that later became a frequent criticism: “a psychologist would observe Mr. Thomas’s constant use of images and epithets which are secretary or glandular.” Ferris also quoted a critic for Time and Tide, who wrote: “This is not merely a book of unusual promise; it is more probably the sort of bomb that bursts not more than once in three years.” The book was also reviewed favorably by Spectator, New Verse, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1939 The Map of Love appeared as a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than The Map of Love and more on real life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meager fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published.

Thomas’s published 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “The Hunchback in the Park,” and “Fern Hill.” Deaths and Entrances was an instant success. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like “Fern Hill,” illustrate an almost Words worthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people.

Thomas’s verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night. His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud.

Thomas was an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories. His first published prose work was After the Fair, printed in The New English Weekly on 15 March 1934. Jacob Korg believes that Thomas’s fiction work can be classified into two main bodies, vigorous fantasies in a poetic style and, after 1939, more straightforward narratives. Korg surmises that Thomas approached his prose writing as an alternate poetic form, which allowed him to produced complex, involuted narratives that do not allow the reader to rest.

3.   Features of Poetry 

Although influenced by the modern symbolism and surrealism movement he refused to follow its creed. Elder Olson, in his 1954 critical study of Thomas’s poetry, wrote “… a further characteristic which distinguished Thomas’s work from that of other poets. It was unclassifiable.”

Olson continued that in a postmodern age that continually attempted to demand that poetry have social reference, none could be found in Thomas’s work, and that his work was so obscure that critics could not explicate it.(2)

Thomas’s  early  poetry  was   noted   for   its   verbal   density, alliteration, sprung   rhythm and internal rhyme, and he was described by some critics as having been influenced by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Thomas’s poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in “Fern Hill”, “In Country Sleep”, “Ballad of the Long-legged Bait” and “In the White Giant’s Thigh” from Under Milk Wood Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance … I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

Dylan Thomas was a Romantic poet and his work was devoid of social problems. He didn’t want to reform the world, but took it as it is. His poetry was different from the realism of Eliot and Auden and the revolutionary spirit of W.B. Yeats. His poetry came from the depth of his heart about life, death, sin, redemption, creation, and decay. The main influences were John Donne, Keats, Wordsworth, Holy Bible, and Hopkins. The main themes of Dylan Thomas’s poetry were nostalgia, life, death, and lost innocence. He wrote often about his past as a boy or as a young man.

Neo-Romanticism and Dylan Thomas

“Romanticism” was an artistic and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. It stressed strong emotion which permitted freedom within or even from classical notions of form in art—and overturning of previous social conventions, particularly the position of the aristocracy. There was a strong element of historical and natural inevitability in its ideas, stressing the importance of “nature” in art and language. Romanticism is also noted for its elevation of the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individuals and artists. It followed the Enlightenment period and was in part inspired by a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms from the previous period, as well as seeing itself as the fulfillment of the promise of that age.

The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets, who were politically active, left-leaning poets led by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day- Lewis and Louis MacNeice. They [the New Romantics] turned to such models as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane and the word play of James Joyce.

Thomas, in particular, helped Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognizable force Dylan Thomas is by far the best-known poet of the New Romantics mentioned above. He is influenced by the romantic movement from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This can be seen in a number of his best works, including the poems “Fern Hill,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” These and other Dylan works show the power of the Romantic style, which fit well with Thomas’s interests and capabilities as a poet.

Imagery

Dylan Thomas is widely regarded as one of the 20th Century’s most influential lyrical poets, and amongst the finest as such of all time. His acclaim is partly due to the force and vitality of his verbal imagery that is uniquely brilliant and inspirational. His vivid and often fantastic imagery was a rejection of the trends in the 20th Century poetics. While his contemporaries gradually altered their writing to serious topical verse, Thomas devoted himself to his passionately felt emotions. Thomas, in many ways, was more in alignment with the Romantics than he was with the poets of his era. He was considered the Shelley of the 20th century as his poems were the perfect embodiments of ‘new-romanticism’ with their violent natural imagery, sexual and Christian symbolism and emotional.

Dylan Thomas attached great importance to the use of imagery, and an understanding of his imagery is essential for an understanding of his poetry. Thomas’ vivid imagery involved word play, fractured syntax, and personal symbolism. Thomas’ poetic imagery shows the use of a mixture of several techniques, the most prominent being the surrealistic, imagistic, and metaphysical. But the Bible, his study of Shakespeare and other English poets also lay under contribution. Much of his imagery is drawn upon the human body, sex and Old Testament.

4. Conclusion

Dylan Thomas was a romantic poet and his work was conspicuous by the absence of social problems. He did not want to reform the world, but took it as it is. His poetry was different from the realism of Elliot and Auden and the revolutionary spirit of W.B. Yeats. His poetry came from the depth of his heart about life, death, sin, redemption, creation and decay. His main influences were John Donne, Keats, Wordsworth, and holy Bible. His complex imagery is based on many sources, including Welsh legend, Christian symbolism, witchcraft, astronomy and Freudian psychology. He is one of the most difficult and obscure poets in Modern Era.

Reference 

• Brinnin, John Malcolm. Dylan Thomas in America. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Davies, A T. Dylan Thomas: Druid of the Broken Body.London:Dent,1972. Print
• Davies, Walford,ed. Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays. London: J M Dent&Sons,1972 Print Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas: The Biography. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000.Print.
• Fryer, Jonathan. Dylan: The Nine Lives of Dylan Thomas. London: K. Cathie, 1993.Print. Goodby, John, and Chris Wigginton. Eds. Dylan Thomas. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• …Ed . The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition. Great Britain: Hachette UK, 2014. Print.
• Korg, Jacob. Dylan Thomas, updated ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print
• Moynihan, William T. The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas. Ithaca,New York:Cornell UP,1966. Print
•  Olson, Elder. Poetry of Dylan Thomas. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1954.Print.
• Thomas, David N. Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow. Bridgend, Wales: Saren, 2000. Print.
• Thomas, Dylan.  The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions,1957. Print.
• Thomas, Dylan. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940.
• Tindall,William York.A reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas.London:Thames Hudson,1962. Print