|
5. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Life
If the 1930s belonged to Auden, then the 1940s must be called the time of
Dylan Thomas, a Welsh. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales and educated
at Swansea Grammar School run by his father. In childhood, he read all of D.
H. Lawrence’s poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid
natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading,
but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. Then he
became a journalist for a popular newspaper, which published his first
anthology in 1934, The Eighteen Poems. The first collection was
proved to be a success due to its charming and song-like alliteration and
internal rhymes and its eccentric violence of imagery. Thomas did not
sympathize with W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot’s thematic concerns with social
and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and
highly charged emotion, has more in common with the eighties century
Romanticism. It seemed as though a Neo-Romantic tradition had been adapted
to English poetry.
Neo-Romanticism used to be a literary trend first applied to
novel writing, prevailing at the end of the ninetieth century.
Robert Louis
Stevenson and other Neo-Romantic writers opposed to the idea that life
reflected reality. They thought that the task of art should nourish the
reader’s imagination. Dissatisfied with the ugly social reality, they refuse
to write about it. They did not admit any connection between art and
morality. In their opinion, the artist should not teach the reader but
create interesting pictures and tell pleasing adventures.
Two years later, in 1936, Thomas published Twenty-five
Poems (1936), followed by Map of Love (1939) and Death and
Entrance (1946), the last one bringing him public reputation on both
sides of the Atlantic.
In 1940, he also published the autobiographic novel, The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas was a brilliant speaker
and often read his poems on B.B.C. During the years from 1950-1953, he went
on a tour throughout the U.S.A. and made powerful and amazing readings of
his own and other people’s poetry. But his
Bohemianism and fatalistic
addiction to alcohol led to his sudden and premature death from alcoholism
in New York, at the age of 39. A year after his death, in 1954, his most
ambitious work— the radio play Under Milk Wood, was first broadcasted
by B.B.C., then staged and published.
The themes of Thomas’s poetry often concern with birth,
death, love and their interrelatedness. Life, to Thomas, is a cycle in which
love leads to a new birth, which in turn leads to death and to a new life.
In his poems, death and life, getting old and growing-up, nature and human
beings, all mixed into an organic whole.
Poems
Thomas is a poet of great lyrical gift. As a Welsh poet, he
followed the tradition of Welsh bardic poetry, which often pays little
attention to formal grammar and thus adds to the obscurity in meaning. “The
Hunchback in the Park” is a vivid character sketch of a hunchback the poet
encountered in the park.
All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.
This poem is of almost total absence of punctuation
marks, there being only 2 full stops in seven stanzas of 42 lines and no
commas at all.
Influenced by Hopkins, Thomas was extremely fond of and good
at alliteration, internal rhymes and “sprung rhythm”. This can be best seen
in his “Poem in October”:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Work to my hearing from harbor and neighbor wood.
And the next two stanzas read:
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border.
|
