Uzbekistan state university of world languages

The aim of my course paper is DYLAN THOMAS. PECULIARITIES OF CREATIVE WORK.

To reach the aim I put forward the following tasks:

• 
  to study Dylan Thomas biography
  
• 
  to investigate Dylan Thomas’s contribution to poem
  
• 
  to analyse………
  
• 
  to consider…………..
  

The subject of my course paper is DYLAN THOMAS. PECULIARITIES OF CREATIVE WORK.

The object of my course paper is Dylan Thomas Poems

The course paper includes introduction, 2 chapters, conclusion and list of references.

MAIN PART

1. 
   Dylan Thomas’s biography
   

Dylan Thomas is one of the writers who has often been associated with Welsh literature and culture in the last sixty years. He is possibly the most notable Welsh author. Fortunately, it is mainly his literary work, and not his tumultuous lifestyle, that is still associated with him. The analysis of some of his poems mirrors his sincere relationship to Wales. In 1937 he married to Caitlin MacNamara who gave birth to three children. These circumstances indicate a typical British conservative and straight forward approach to family life. Dylan Thomas was influenced in his writing by the Romantic Movement for the beginning of the nineteenth century and this can be seen in a number of his best works. Dylan Thomas uses symbols and images of nature to express how he feels towards death and childhood. He says that images are used to create a feeling of love towards life. Despite Dylan Thomas’s obscure images, he expresses a clear message of religious devotion in many of his poems. The style of Dylan Thomas is an opaque poetic style which Thomas used to perfection. He possessed tremendous talent and was blessed with immense gifts that made him a professional success at a relatively young age.

Dylan Thomas is one of the writers who has often been associated with Welsh literature and culture in the last sixty years. He is possibly the most notable Welsh author. Fortunately, it is mainly his literary work, and not his tumultuous lifestyle, that is still associated with him. The analysis of some of his poems mirrors his sincere relationship to Wales. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. After he left school at the age of sixteen, he started working as a journalist in Swansea. In 1937, he married Caitlin MacNamara who gave birth to three children. These circumstances indicate a typical British, conservative and straightforward approach to family life. However, Dylan started drinking heavily, and Caitlin is rumoured to have had several extramarital affairs, even with colleagues and friends of her husband. Having moved to London, alcohol and indulgence were expensive for the young family, so they could not cover their costs anymore. Thus, in 1950, Thomas announced that he would emigrate 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 marriage with Caitlin 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 in the churchyard of Laugharne. Dylan Thomas was influenced in his writing by the Romantic Movement from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and this can be seen in a number of his best works. Dylan Thomas uses symbols and images of nature to express how he feels towards death and childhood. He says that images are used to create a feeling of love towards life. Despite Dylan Thomas‟ often obscure images, he expresses a clear message of religious devotion in many of his poems. He creates images that reflect God‟s connection with the earth and body. In “And death shall have no dominion,” Thomas portrays the redemption of the soul in death, and the soul‟s liberation into harmony with nature and God. Thomas associates God with thunder, rainbows, and night only to remind us that he is even more present in a simple stone as he is in other great entities. Colour imagery is also there in some of his poems as he describes his happiness as a child. He explains his young days as being as “happy as the grass is green.” The style of Dylan Thomas is an opaque poetic style, which Thomas uses to perfection. It is used to describe the unusual and day-to-day activities. Dylan Thomas possessed tremendous talent and was blessed with immense gifts that made him a professional success at a relatively young age; however, his personal life was often disappointing..

Thomas basically made London his home for some 10 years from about 1936. He had become famous in literary circles. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. His attempts to make money with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and as a film scriptwriter were not sufficiently remunerative, and the family was very poor. He wrote film scripts during World War II, having been excused from military service owing to a lung condition. Unfortunately, he was totally lacking in any sort of business acumen. He fell badly behind with his income tax returns, and what money he managed to make was taken from him, at source, by the British Exchequer. He took to drinking more heavily and to borrowing from richer friends. Still, he continued to work, though in his maturity the composition of his poems became an ever-slower and more painstaking business.

The poems collected in Deaths and Entrances (1946) show a greater lucidity and confirm Thomas as a religious poet. This book reveals an advance in sympathy and understanding due, in part, to the impact of World War II and to the deepening harmony between the poet and his Welsh environment, for he writes generally in a mood of reconciliation and acceptance. He often adopts a bardic tone and is a true romantic in claiming a high, almost priestlike function for the poet. He also makes extensive use of Christian myth and symbolism and often sounds a note of formal ritual and incantation in his poems. The re-creation of childhood experience produces a visionary, mystical poetry in which the landscapes of youth and infancy assume the holiness of the first Eden(“Poem in October,” “Fern Hill”); for Thomas, childhood, with its intimations of immortality, is a state of innocence and grace. But the rhapsodic lilt and music of the later verse derives from a complex technical discipline, so that Thomas’ absorption in his craft produces verbal harmonies that are unique in English poetry.

Meanwhile the London or London-based atmosphere became increasingly dangerous and uncongenial both to Thomas and to his wife. As early as 1946 he was talking of emigrating to the United States, and in 1947 he had what would seem to be a nervous breakdown but refused psychiatric assistance. He moved to Oxford, where he was given a cottage by the distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor His trips to London, however, principally in connection with his BBC work, were grueling, exhausting, and increasingly alcoholic. In 1949 Taylor’s wife financed the purchase of a cottage, the Boat House, Laugharne, and Thomas returned to Wales. In the following year his first American tour was arranged, and for a while it seemed as if a happy compromise had been arranged between American money and Welsh tranquillity.

The prose that Thomas wrote is linked with his development as a poet, and his first stories, included in The Map of Love and A Prospect of the Sea (1955), are a by-product of the early poetry. But in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), the half-mythical Welsh landscapes of the early stories have been replaced by realistically and humorously observed scenes. A poet’s growing consciousness of himself, of the real seriousness hidden behind his mask of comedy, and of the world around him is presented with that characteristic blend of humour and pathos which is later given such lively expression in his “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood (1954). This play, which evokes the lives of the inhabitants of a small Welsh town, shows Thomas’s full powers as an artist in comedy; it is richly imaginative in language, dramatic in characterization, and fertile in comic invention.

Under Milk Wood was presented at the Poetry Center in New York City in 1953, and its final version was broadcast by the BBC in 1954. In 1952 Thomas published his Collected Poems, which exhibited the deeper insight and superb craftsmanship of a major 20th-century English poet. The volume was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. But, because of the insistence of the Inland Revenue, his monetary difficulties persisted. He coped with his exhausting American tours by indulging in reckless drinking bouts. There were far too many people who seem to have derived pleasure from making the famous poet drunk. His personal despair mounted; his marriage was in peril; and at last, while in New York City and far from his Welsh home, he died. Although the autopsy indicated that pneumonia was the primary cause of death, many believed it to have been alcohol-related, because he had been engaged in a drinking binge prior to his expiration. It was later revealed that in the hours before he was taken to the hospital, Thomas, who had complained of breathing difficulties, was administered several doses of morphine by a personal physician. It is possible that the drug fatally depressed his already-impaired respiratory system.

Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "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, but 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 Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).

In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.

Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

In 1995 Ty Llên (later the Dylan Thomas Centre) was established in Swansea. The building, a former guildhall, was largely converted into a space for businesses in 2012, but a 2014 endowment allowed for a significant expansion of the permanent collection of Thomas memorabilia housed there.

Under Milk Wood was presented at the Poetry Center in New York City in 1953, and its final version was broadcast by the BBC in 1954. In 1952 Thomas published his Collected Poems, which exhibited the deeper insight and superb craftsmanship of a major 20th-century English poet. The volume was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. But, because of the insistence of the Inland Revenue, his monetary difficulties persisted. He coped with his exhausting American tours by indulging in reckless drinking bouts. There were far too many people who seem to have derived pleasure from making the famous poet drunk. His personal despair mounted; his marriage was in peril; and at last, while in New York City and far from his Welsh home, he died. Although the autopsy indicated that pneumonia was the primary cause of death, many believed it to have been alcohol-related, because he had been engaged in a drinking binge prior to his expiration. It was later revealed that in the hours before he was taken to the hospital, Thomas, who had complained of breathing difficulties, was administered several doses of morphine by a personal physician. It is possible that the drug fatally depressed his already-impaired respiratory system.