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BACKGROUND
- born in Swansea, Wales
- father =
- schoolteacher, read Shakespeare, Bible
- --> interest in words for DD
- left school at 16, became a reporter 15 months
- WWII:
- BBC documentary film editor, radio broadcaster
- * of boyhood reminiscence:
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)
stories,
- Quite Early One Morning (1954) stories,
- Under Milk Wood (1954) verse drama
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BACKGROUND
- original dramatist, essayist
- greatest lyric poet of his
generation
- Dylan Thomas: 1940s:
- return to stylized,
extravagant, romantic rhetoric
- rejected by Philip Larkin (as romantic excesses)
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POETRY
- childhood influences =
- Wales setting
- Shakespeare
- Bible
- nursery rhymes (sound over meaning *)
- writing poetry since a small boy
- 1st published volume at 19
- published regularly during 1930s
- (1) early poetry
=
- frustratingly difficult to read & understand
- "I like contradicting my
images"
- obsessed with mortality/death (the power that gives life
takes it)
- Eighteen Poems (1934)
- Twenty-Five Poems (1936)
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POETRY
- (2) later poetry
=
- less obscure
- more simple, direct style
- ceremonial style
- accepts death: perpetual cycle of death & rebirth
- Deaths and Entrances (1946) = his most famous collection
- "Fern Hill" (1946)
- nostalgic recollection of a childhood holiday on a farm
- ***nostalgia
(EVW, GO)
- lamentation ("threnodies")
- like Milton's Lycidas, Gray's "Elegy,"
- Shelley's Adonais, Arnold's Thyrsis
- lost youth
- Eden before the Fall
- mortality, corruption, time
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LINKS
LINKS
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