Dylan Thomas

## Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, **1914**, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare to Thomas before he could read. He loved the sounds of **nursery rhymes**. Although both of his parents spoke fluent Welsh, Thomas and his older sister never learned the language, and Thomas wrote exclusively in English. **His main genres were: poetry, prose, radio plays, and screenplays.**

Thomas was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He read all of D. H. Lawrence‘s poetry, impressed by vivid descriptions of the natural world. **Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading but neglected other subjects**. He dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. Although he edited the school magazine, contributing poetry and prose to it, Thomas did badly at school since he was always intellectually lazy with regard to any subject that did not directly concern him.  **Thomas began writing poetry as a child, publishing his work in school magazines**.

**By 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time**. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems. He struggled a lot with several personal crisis mainly related to to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one's identity."

Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was **obsessed with words—with their sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings**.

In 1934, **when Thomas was twenty**, he moved to London, **won the Poet’s Corner book prize, and published his first book, *18 Poems*** (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. During this period of success, Thomas also began a habit of alcohol abuse.

In 1940, With his asthma Dylan managed to **avoid military service**, **finding steady employment writing scripts for Strand Films and for BBC Radio.** To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, **in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems like "Under Milk Wood".**

In January **1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time.** His reading tours of the United States through which he popularized poetry reading are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling and a singing Welsh lilt.Thomas frequently drank to excess, and that such drinking adversely affected his social behavior. Indeed, the legend of Dylan Thomas grew: the hard-drinking bard, the erratic chanter of his own songs, the romantic artist at odds with the modern world.

**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 due to alcohol and drug abuse.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### World War II

It was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all of the great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. The Allied Powers consisted of the British Empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United States of America. The Axis Powers consisted of Germany, Italy, and Japan.  The vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of total war, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources.

### Post War Era

* Human loss
* Destruction of property
* Economic losses
* United Nations creation
* War-crime trials
* The Great Depression in the USA
* Cold War
* The 19th century decline of Welsh language
* Bibliography

### Neo-Romanticism (1940-1950)

A reaction to the ugly modern world of machines and new cities” (Marshall, 2)

* **Time:** 1940-1950
* **Place:** Britain
* **Cause:** Reaction to Modernism
* **Aim:** Revival of Romantic Spirit
* **Areas:** Literature
* **Common Themes:** Utopian Landscapes – Mood and State of Mind – The Beauty of  Nature – Myths and Ancient stories – Longing for the past – Emotions and Feelings over actions   (later mocked by The Movement(1950s))

**Neoromantic Literature:** It based on a re-discovery and re-evaluation of the works of romantic forebears in reaction to the modern poetry of 20th century.

* **Themes of Works:**
	+ Internal perception of life VS. Superficial View of Reality
	+ The untouched Nature VS. Industrialized society
	+ Longing for the past VS. Immediacy of present moment
	+ Feelings and emotions VS. Rational Intellect
	+ The perfect love
	+ The Romantic Death
	+ The beauty of Nature
	+ Historical landscapes
	+ The Exotic

**Form:**

* I- Form
* Images and Symbols
* Free Form

## Bibliography

* **Poetry Collections:**
	+ *18 Poems* (1934)
	+ *Twenty-Five Poems* (1936)
	+ *The Map of Love* (1939)
	+ *New Poems* (1943)
	+ *Deaths and Entrances* (1946)
	+ *Twenty-Six Poems* (1949)
	+ *In Country Sleep and other poems* (1952)
	+ *Collected Poems, 1934–1952* (1952)

### Literary Style

Thomas describes his technique in a letter: “I make one image—though ‘make’ is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.”

He favoured the aesthetic aim of poetry over its didactive purpose.

He was considered a **Lyric poet,** those poets whose poems have a musical rhythm and explore Romantic feelings and emotions. Thomas's early poetry was noted for its **verbal density, alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme.** One poet Thomas greatly admired, and who is regarded as an influence, was Thomas Hardy. When Thomas travelled in America, he recited Hardy's work in his readings.

In contrast to post-war poetry, **Dylan Thomas’ language** is completely different**: full of life, energy and feeling, with great strength and power.** He was born and brought up in Wales, and Welsh traditions of the power of the spoken word, especially in matters of religion, and reflected strongly in his poetry. His words praises and delights in natural forces: the life of nature and the countryside, the forces of birth, sex and death, and the powerful feelings that they create.

* Genre: Poetry – Prose – Radio plays – Screenplays
* Literary Techniques and Devices:
	+ Image, alliteration, assonance
	+ Internal Rhyme
	+ Intense lyricism ( gentle or romantic emotion, expressed in writing, reading or music)
	+ Musical lilt (rising and falling voice)

* Common settings: Countryside, nature, landscapes.
* Topics of interest: Physical environment and location - Welsh Poetic Traditions - Personal disagreement with modern industrialized societ
* Themes explored: Longing for childhood, beauty of nature, spiritual truth (against the man in society), love towards life, decay and death, intense emotions and feelings, inspiration, imagination, inner observation, ancient  stories and myths, God and religion.

## Fern Hill

It is considered an autobiographical poem in which Dylan Thomas recalls his memories of his happy childhood in his mother´s farm in contrast to his lamenting and miserable manhood. The grown up speaker retells his happy childhood memories of a farm and his days there: animals and birds, natural landscape, parts of the day, feelings and emotions. He, when a child, was unaware of the passing of time and growth coming. In the last stanza, the poet makes reference to time having passed, the child having grown up, his innocence being lost, and becoming aware of his adulthood, only now that he is not a child anymore.

**Main Theme:** A journey from childhood to adulthood - from innocence to experience - from life to death

**Setting:** Fern Hill, the poet´s family farm in Carmarthenshire.

**Speaker:** First person

**Tone:** Nostalgic and Melancholic

**Form:** Not respecting a regular pattern of meter. 6 stanzas poem, with 9 lines in each stanza with Internal Rhyme

### Poem

1. Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

2. About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

3. The night above the dingle starry,

4. Time let me hail and climb

5. Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

6. And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

7. And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

8. Trail with daisies and barley

9. Down the rivers of the windfall light.

10. And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

11. About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

12. In the sun that is young once only,

13. Time let me play and be

14. Golden in the mercy of his means,

15. And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

16. Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

17. And the sabbath rang slowly

18. In the pebbles of the holy streams.

19. All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

20. Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

21. And playing, lovely and watery

22. And fire green as grass.

23. And nightly under the simple stars

24. As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

25. All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

26. Flying with the ricks, and the horses

27. Flashing into the dark.

28. And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

29. With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

30. Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

31. The sky gathered again

32. And the sun grew round that very day.

33. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

34. In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

35. Out of the whinnying green stable

36. On to the fields of praise.

37. And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

38. Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

39. In the sun born over and over,

40. I ran my heedless ways,

41. My wishes raced through the house high hay

42. And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

43. In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

44. Before the children green and golden

45. Follow him out of grace,

46. Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

47. Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

48. In the moon that is always rising,

49. Nor that riding to sleep

50. I should hear him fly with the high fields

51. And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

52. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

53. Time held me green and dying

54. Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

## Intro Paragraph

The middle of the twentieth century was marked by a lingering sensation of economic, political, and social instability in most of the western world. The Second World War (1939-1945) left a footprint of horror and meant the demise of millions of civilians, both in and outside the battlefield. In the midst of the chaos, a group of disillusioned writers prompted the emergence of a movement today known as Neo-Romanticism, longing to remember the sense of hope and peace they experienced in the past. Often exploring themes related to the beauty of childhood and the union between humankind and nature, neo-romantics reacted against the intellectualism characteristic of the twentieth century modernist poetry. Among this group of writers was Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet whose expert use of musical rhythms and vivid imagery allowed him to create outstanding pieces. This is the case of "Fern Hill" (1945), a nostalgic six-stanzas-long poem that explores the speaker’s idyllic childhood in a picturesque farm and the inevitable passing of time. Throughout the poem, Thomas makes masterly use of imagery and rythm to reflect the beauty and innocence of past times while attempting to reconcile with the paradoxical and inevitable passing of time.

### MLA citation

Thomas, Dylan. “Fern Hill.” 1945. *Collected Poems, 1934-1952*. J.M. Dent & Sons, 1952.

## Sources

Marshal , Linda . “Romanticism in the post-Romantic era".All poetry ,2 2010.

https://allpoetry.com/column/12197357-Romanticism-in-the-postRomantic-era-by-Linda-Marshall

Mohammed, Younis. “Dylan Thomas as Neo Romantic Poet” 2018.

Baldick, Chris. “The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms” 2001.