DYLAN THOMAS

(1914-1953)

BIO

• 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

  
   

BIO

• * 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

• 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)

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)

  
  
   

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