Charactistics of Dylan Thomas.

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 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 rumored to have had several extramarital affairs, even with colleagues and friends of her husband. 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.

a) Dylan Thomas heralded a new kind of poetry in the twentieth century. It was so different from the realism of Eliot and Auden.

b) The first quality which according to a critic, strikes reader of Thomas's poetry is its lyrical, musical quality. Thomas's early writing was strongly criticized as being obscure.

c) In his poem there is an intensity born out of the struggle to give expression to very powerful feeling.

d) He writes with an elegiac appreciation of natural force, the force of birth, sex and death.

e) Thomas realized the problem for his readers. He said himself that his poetry was rigorously compressed.

f) Thomas's early works were criticized in other respects also. Besides their lack of meaning, people argued that they were concerned solely with birth, death and population. Thomas described his early work as his 'womb-tomb' period.

g) Thomas sees life as a continuous process. He sees the working of bio9logy as a magical transformation producing unity out of identity and identity out of unity. He sees the generations linked with one another, and man linked with nature.

h) Some of the early poems see death as a threat, a 'running grave'. In the first London days, it was thought that Thomas would die within a few years.

I) Death can be personified and symbolized; pathos is a ready emotion. But a fullness of life cannot successfully be shown as a person or a symbol.

j) The development of Thomas's poetry can be seen by an examination of the verse itself; but he also explained what he was trying to do in his letters and his prose comments on his poetry.

k) His best poem affirm with a great passion vigor the joys and beauties of life, even in the midst of death.

l) His major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations to each other.