Dylan_Thomas

Question: Write an essay on a period or literary group in British poetry, or a British poet or a British poem in about 3000 words. DYLAN THOMAS (Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953)) INTRODUCTION: Dylan Thomas was a poet of transition from modernism to post war poetry. Modernism in English poetry reflected post-war (1) disillusionment, the impact of science and industrial society and elite cosmopolitanism. Literary movements like symbolism, imagism, classicism, surrealism, socialism etc. Contributed to its emergence.. Traditional verse forms and the paraphrasable content of poetry were rejected. Consequently, new poetry characterized by free verse, missing syntactic links and recondite allusions became obscure and difficult for the common reader. But the cinema, the radio, the television and new other audio visual means of mass communication posed a challenge to the elite tendency. Class and mass cultures clashed. Dylan Thomas was a product of this clash or tension. His love for words and language was inspired by nursery-rhymes, folk tales, ballads, hymns, the rhythms of the bible, Blake’s Songs of innocence, and Shakespeare. With his love of rhetoric he played the game of language with a romantic sincerity, a dazzling brilliance, and a baffling theatrically, which just fell short of achieving the vision of the mature poet which is focused on life within and beyond language. Thomas had become a legendary figure estimate in his life time. He made poetry a performing art. His poetry was lyrical and sometimes enigmatic in a challenging manner about sex, death and religion. A BRIEF LIFE SKETCH Born 27 October 1914 Uplands, Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales Died 9 November 1953 (aged 39) New York City, United States Occupation Poet and writer Literary Modernism Spouse(s) Caitlin Macnamara (m. 1937–1953, his death) Children Llewellyn Edouard Thomas (1939–2000) Aeronwy Bryn Thomas (1943–2009) Colm Garan Hart Thomas (b. 1949) Dylan Thomas was born at 5, Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands, Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914. The red-brick semi-detached house in an affluent area of the city where Thomas lived until he was 19, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth. It was situated on a steep hill and the front bedroom where Thomas was born had a view of the 'sea-city', then a busy industrial port. His father, David John Thomas (1876–1952), had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and had ambition to rise above his position at the local grammar school teaching English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. He had one sister, Nancy, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) who was nine years older than he. The Thomas children spoke only English though their parents were bilingual in English and Welsh, and David Thomas gave Welsh lessons at home. Thomas's father chose the name 'Dylan', which could be translated as 'son of the sea', after a character in The Mabinogion. His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced dəlan (Dullan) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry he might be teased as the "dull one". When he broadcast on Welsh BBC, early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas, however, favoured the anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be 'Dillan'. His childhood was spent in Swansea, with summer trips to Carmarthenshire to visit Fern Hill, a dairy farm owned by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, of which he wrote "the country is holy", and remembered it as a time when he was "young and easy under the apple boughs". These rural sojourns and the contrast with town life in Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work: short stories, radio essays, and the poem "Fern Hill". Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with them throughout his life. It is considered that Thomas was indulged by his mother as a child and enjoyed being coddled. He carried this trait through into adulthood and was skillful at gaining attention and sympathy. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's dame school on Mirador Crescent, a private school a few streets away from his home. He described his experience there in Quite Early One Morning. Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature. In October 1925, Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant, where his father taught English. He was an undistinguished student. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. His first poem was published in the school's magazine and he became its editor. He left school at 16, in 1931, to become a reporter for the local South Wales Daily Post, only to leave under pressure 18 months later, in 1932 but he continued to work as a freelance journalist for several more years and continued to live at his parents' home. He began keeping poetry notebooks while at school and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these years. Thomas moved to Landon in 1934. There he did some reviewing, writing for films, and broadcasting for the BBC. His recitals of poems on the radio or on gramophone records were magical, magnetic and electrifying. His warm, powerful voice, and his bardic , intensity, made many poems sound greater than ever before. But in London he felt a stranger and lived a Bohemain life. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara, a niece of Augustus John, the painter, and went to live with his bride in Laugharne. They had no money, but were in complete happiness “I have achieved”, he wrote “poverty with distinction, but never poverty with dignity, the best I can manage is dignity and poverty. A weekly allowance from an admirer, James Laughlin of USA, helped him survive. He hated London. It was to him an insane city to restless dead. Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at nearby St Vincent's Hospital at 1.58am. He was comatose on arrival, and the medical notes state that he had "acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response". Caitlin flew to America the following day and was taken to the hospital, by which time a tracheotomy had been performed on Thomas. Her reported first words were "Is the bloody man dead yet'" Thomas died at noon on 9 November, still in a coma. A post mortem gave the primary cause of death as pneumonia, with pressure on the brain and a fatty liver as contributing factors. And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. From "And death shall have no dominion" Twenty-five Poems (1936) POETRY 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' early poetry was noted for its verbal density, alliteration, sprung rhythm and internal rhyme, and he was described by some critics as having being influenced by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is attributed to Hopkins own use of sprung verse, and the fact that he taught himself Welsh, bringing some features of Welsh poetic metre into his own work. When HenryTreece wrote to Thomas comparing his style to that of Hopkins, Thomas wrote back denying any such influence. One poet who Thomas greatly admired, and who is also regarded as an influence, was Thomas Hardy. When Thomas travelled America, he would often recite Hardy's work during his readings. Other poets from whom critics believe Thomas drew influence include James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence. William York Tindall, in his 1962 study A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas, finds comparison between Thomas' and Joyce's wordplay, while he notes the themes of rebirth and nature are common to the works of Lawrence and Thomas. Although it was Thomas who described himself as the 'Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive', he later stated that the phrase 'Swansea's Rimbaud' was coined by poet Roy Campbell. Critics have also explored the connection between the creation of Thomas' mythological pasts into his works such as "The Orchards", which Ann Elizabeth Mayer believes reflects the Welsh myths of the Mabinogion. Thomas disliked being regarded as a provincial poet, and decried any notion of 'Welshness' in his poetry. When Thomas wrote to Stephen Spender in 1952, thanking him for a review of his Collected Poems, he added "Oh, & I forgot. I'm not influenced by Welsh bardic poetry. I can't read Welsh." Despite this his work was rooted in the geography of Wales. Thomas acknowledged that he would return to Wales when he had difficulty writing, and John Ackerman argues that "His inspiration and imagination were rooted in his Welsh background". Caitlin Thomas, in her autobiography Leftover Life to Kill, described Wales as the "land of his birth, which he never in thought, and hardly ever in body, moved out of." Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in poems such as "Fern Hill", "In Country Sleep", "Ballad of the Long-legged Bait" or "In the White Giant's Thigh" fromUnder Milk Wood: Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house and heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost, the scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed "In the White Giant's Thigh" 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. The words alone. 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 behavior 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. Thomas was also an accomplished writer of prose work, with collections such as Potrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories. One of Thomas' most popular works was the short essay A Child's Christmas in Wales, which after being released as part of a recording, in which Thomas read his own work, became his most popular prose work in America. The original 1952 recording of A Child's Christmas in Wales was a 2008 selection for theUnited States National Recording Registry, stating that it is "credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States". Memorials Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art. “ ” From "In my Craft or Sullen Art" Deaths and Entrances, 1946 There is a bronze statue of Thomas, by John Doubleday, in the city's maritime quarter.[70] The Dylan Thomas Theatre,Swansea Little Theatre and the Dylan Thomas Centre, formerly the town's Guildhall, are also found in Swansea. The latter is now a literature centre, where exhibitions and lectures are held, and is the setting for an annual Dylan Thomas Festival. Another monument to Thomas stands in Cwmdonkin Park, one of his favourite childhood haunts, close to his birthplace at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. The memorial is a small rock in a closed-off garden, set within the park. The rock is inscribed with the closing lines from "Fern Hill": Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. Thomas's home in Laugharne, the Boat House, has been made a memorial. Several of the pubs in Swansea also have associations with the poet. One of Swansea's oldest pubs, 'The No Sign Bar' (since renamed 'The No Sign Wine Bar') was a regular haunt of Thomas's and is mentioned in his story "The Followers". A class 153 diesel multiple unit was named 'Dylan Thomas 1914–1953' and in 2004 the Dylan Thomas Prize was created in honour of the poet,[71] awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30. Following this, in 2005, the Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award was established. The prize is administered by the Dylan Thomas Centre, and is awarded at the annual Swansea Bay Film Festival. In 1982 a plaque was unveiled in his honour in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. A new bronze statue, to mark the centenary of Thomas' birth, by Welsh sculptor Peter Nicholas, is planned for 2014. Selected works Poetry collections  1934 18 Poems  1936 Twenty-Five Poems  1939 The Map of Love  1943 New Poems  1946 Deaths and Entrances  1950 Twenty-Six Poems  1952 In Country Sleep  1952 Collected Poems, 1934–1952 (Dent) Collected prose  1940 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent  1946 Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, New Directions  1953 Adventures In The Skin Trade And Other Stories (Adventures In The Skin Trade, an unfinished novel). New Directions  1954 Quite Early One Morning (Planned by Thomas, posthumously published). New Directions  1955 A Child's Christmas in Wales, New Directions  1955 A Prospect of the Sea and other stories and prose writings, Dent  1957 Letters to Vernon Watkins, Dent  1965 Rebecca's Daughters, Triton  1969 The year of love. Drama  1954 Under Milk Wood (Radio play)  1953 The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts  1964 The Beach of Falesa (Screenplay) CONCLUSION “Drunk with melody, and what the words were he cared not”, said Robert Graves about Dylan Thomas in 1995. Another critic (David Holbrook) argued that “Thomas developed his imagery of wombs and tombs, sex and corpses, as a means of protecting himself against adult reality”. But David Daiches admired Thomas’s celebration of life. The obscurity of his diction and syntax and the ambiguity of his few major themes make him a controversial poet. But some of his poems illustrate 20th century English poetry at its best. His love for words and language was exceptional. Some his lines and phrase are memorable and form a part of current English. “I advance for as long as forever is” , “I sang in my chains like the sea”, “Do not go gentle into that good night”, and “The hand that signed the paper felled a city” “neural meaning”, “colour of saying”, “a grief ago”, “all the sun long”, “once below a time”, “the lamb white days” “a process in the weather of hear”, “the riding Thames” etc. show his originality. He realized his ambition of making poems “a water light section” of the stream of life and consciousness. His symbolisms has three aspects: natural, convectional and private, He was a poet for whom meaning was bound up with pattern and order. He make his language a part of the stream of consciousness. His world was “an enclosed one, a world of intuitions about the imprisoned self which could be shared between the writer and reader but is not capable for demonstration in terms of communal nature of man”. If he had lived longer, “he would have seen Man, as he had seen himself, “up to his head in his blood”, and –for that very reason-also up to his head in a world of poetry. _____________________________________________