Paper 4, Module 21: Text Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala Content Writer/Author Dr. Sushil Kumar, DB College, Sasthamkotta (CW) Content Reviewer (CR) Dr. Jameela Begum Former Head & Professor, Institute of English, University of Kerala Language Editor (LE) Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala 2 Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Keywords:- Dylan Thomas - Neo-Romanticism –Surrealism- Imagery - Poetic styles 1 About the Author Dylan Thomas was born at in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glam organ, Wales, on 27 October 1914. (image 2) Uplands was, one of the more affluent place of the city which kept him away from the industrial areas. His father D.J. Thomas was a senior teacher of English at Swansea grammar School and he was regarded as a scholar of Shakespeare. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, was nine years elder to him. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife was both bilingual in English and Welsh. His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea was an inspiration for some of his work, like many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. 3 In his last school years at sixteen Thomas began to contribute articles to a local newspaper called the “Herald of Wales”. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), In 1934, he moved to London where he met Pamela Handsford Johnson who was an author. She became his girl friend whom he expected to marry. But the love affairs could not consummate in the permanent alliance of marriage. In 1937 Thomas married Caitlin Mac Namara (image 3) whom he had met a year before. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939 (d. 2000). Their daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, was born on 3 March 1943. The second son, Colm Garan Hart, (image 4)was born on 24 July 1949. During the Second World War, Thomas did a great deal of work for the British Broadcasting Corporation and earned reputation of a first grade radio announcer and verse reader. By this time he had become an addict to liquor and Caitlin is rumoured to have had extramarital affairs, even with colleagues and friends of Thomas. Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, and narrated, with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In , “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, and Thomas’s scripts, “Me and My 4 Bike," “Rebecca’s Daughters," and “The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Film scripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995). In 1950, Thomas announced that he would immigrate 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 married life 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 at St. Martin’s Church in Langhorne. (imge 7) The former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, one of Dylan Thomas's many noteworthy fans, campaigned for Thomas to be commemorated at "Poet's Corner", within London's Westminster Abbey. In 1995, President Carter opened the Dylan Thomas Centre (the National Literature Centre of Wales) in Swansea, the first literary powerhouse in the U.K. The Dylan Thomas Theatre and was the first Little Theatre in Wales (see image 5). The centre is the focus for an annual Dylan Thomas Festival, which celebrates the life and works of one of the city's most notable son. Swansea is also home to the Dylan Thomas Theatre and his bronze statue literally sits nearby 2. Major Contributions Dylan Thomas’ first poem was published in the school’s magazine. He later became its editor. he began keeping poetry notebooks (image 6)and amassed 200 poems in four journals between 1930 and 1934. It is often commented that Thomas was indulged like a child and he was, in fact, still a teenager when he published many of the poems he would become famous for: “And Death Shall Have No Dominion" “Before I Knocked” and “The Force That Through the 5 Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And Death shall have no Dominion", appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933 and further work appeared in The Listener in 1934 ,caught the attention of two of the most senior poets of the day, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. His highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published on 18 December 1934, and went on to win a contest run by The Sunday Referee, giving him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, which did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. Eighteen Poems was published in December, 1934, a short time after Thomas moved to London. The volume received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably. Ferris quoted from an anonymous review in the Morning Post that called the poems "individual but not private" and went on to strike a note that later became a frequent criticism: "a psychologist would observe Mr. Thomas's constant use of images and epithets which are secretary or glandular." Ferris also quoted a critic for Time and Tide, who wrote: "This is not merely a book of unusual promise; it is more probably the sort of bomb that bursts not more than once in three years." The book was also reviewed favorably by Spectator, New Verse, and the Times Literary Supplement. (http://www.poemhunter.com/dylan- thomas/biography/ ) In 1939 The Map of Love appeared as a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than The Map of Love and more on real life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meager fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily 6 from friends and acquaintances. In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published. Thomas’s published 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," "Poem in October," "The Hunchback in the Park," and "Fern Hill." Deaths and Entrances was an instant success. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like "Fern Hill," illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night. His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud. (Dylan Thomas_2012_3_All poems.pdf) 7 Thomas was an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories.