Plan: General background

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet, is the author of some of the most stirring, passionate and eloquent verse in modern literature. He was born in Swansea, Wales. His father was a schoolteacher and poet whose readings of the Bible, Shakespeare and other poets stimulated Thomas's early fascination with words.

Thomas left school at 16 and spent fifteen months as a newspaper reporter, but poetry writing was more to his taste. He published his first volume of poetry at the age of nineteen and continued to publish books of verse during the 1930s. He pub­lished "Eighteen Poems" in 1934 and "Twenty-Five Poems" in 1936. The literary critics consider the poems of these two collections frustratingly difficult. Dylan Thomas himself wrote to a friend: "I like things that are difficult to write and difficult to understand. ... 1 like contradicting my images, saying two things at once in one word, four in two and one in six". His most famous collection of poems 'Deaths and Entrances" (1946), reveals a movement away from obscurity to a simpler, more direct, yet cer­emonial style.

A collection of stories about his childhood and youth "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" appeared in 1940. During World War II Thomas worked for BBC as a documentary film editor and also as a radio broadcaster.

Another book of boyhood reminiscences "Quite Early One

Morning" (1954), and a verse play, "Under Milk Wood' (1954), were published after his death.

Dylan Thomas's poems written in earlier period and later pe­riod greatly differ in their approach to life and mortality. Young Dylan Thomas was obsessed with mortality, an awareness that "the force" that gives life to plants and people is also the "de­stroyer", the later Thomas came to the realization that "...death shall have no dominion" in a cosmos in which all living things exist in a perpetual cycle of change and rebirth. Here is one of his poems written at later period: