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The Works of Dylan Thomas Thesis Statement: Dylan Thomas, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty, applies his own unnecessarily complicated and obscure style of writing to his poetry, stories, and dramas. I. Dylan's obscure poems contained elements of surrealism and personal fantasy, which is what draws readers to them to reveal the universality of the experiences with which they are concerned. A. 18 Poems 1. "Continuity between nature and the Stories of Christ and Adam" (Korg 42). 2. Semantic properties of language are possessed by the natural world. 3. Conflicts preceding the mystical resolution. 4.
Personal statement as dramatic monologue. 5. Complexity of death. B. Twenty-five Poems 1. Dylan's reaction to other people. 2. "Immortal companionship of matter and spirit" (Korg 62). 3. "The duality of time as it is manifested in the alternation of the seasons" (Korg 67). 4. "Relationships with other people and with external scenes and events as episodes in the drama of spiritual life" (Korg 70). C.
Later Poems 1. "These later poems were usually written in response to some particular experience rather than to experience in general. Their points of departure are intimate and local rather than cosmic" (Korg 73). 2. The lover is condemned to an essential betrayal. 3. "Ordinary events, humble folk, and local scenery, together with the compassion and tenderness these things evoke, occupy the foreground of these poems" (Korg 82). D. Last Poems 1. "Poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God" (Korg 91). 2. "The renewal of earth after some mysterious universal catastrophe" (Korg 95). 3. Essential images and impressions held loosely with a syntactic framework.
Brown ii. E. Longer Poems 1. "The Altarwise by owl-light sequence is an intricately ambiguous, punning fabric in which Thomas carries his linguistic and rhetorical virtuosity to extremes, producing a result both more complex and more obscure than any of the other works" (Korg 100) 2. The views of the mystic in the real world. 3.
The midwinter rebirth legends from primitive cultures, the return of the spring. 4. Christian myths with other religions: birth, sacrifice, light, and darkness. II. Dylan was as productive a writer of stories as he was of poems. A. Thomas's tories fall under two categories: vigorous poetic fantasies, and poetic objective narrative.
B. "The main characters are madmen, simpletons, fanatics, lechers, and poets in love: people enslaved by the dictates of feelings" (Korg 121). III. He only completed four scripts but worked on several others as a writer of films. A.
He wrote documentaries for the Ministry of Information during his wartime job. B. "Cinematic writing made few demands on Thomas's real literary gifts, but it did show that he had an unexpected capacity for adapting himself to the new form, and for persevering with extended projects until they were complete" (Korg 137). C. Too many unfinished scripts or aborted projects. D. Rebecca's Daughters Concluding Statement: Dylan Thomas's undeniable originality has set him apart from most people, but he had something in common with nearly every great poet, story-writer, and film-writer, his own style.
The Works of Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas was a brilliant poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, and novelist. His work was known for musical quality of the language, comic or visionary scenes and sensual images. "As he groped among painful and oppressive feelings, turning his thoughts into poems, Thomas was formulating both a mysticism and a poetic style" (Korg 2). Dylan Thomas, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty, applies his own unnecessarily complicated and obscure style of writing to his poetry. Dylan's obscure poems contained elements of surrealism and personal fantasy, which is what draws readers to them to reveal the universality of the experiences with which they are concerned. "Thomas's poetry is marked by vivid metaphors, the use of Christian and Freudian imagery, and celebration of the wonder of the wonder of growth and death" (Dylan Thomas). His life had little relevance to his poetry, his love for it came from words rather than ideas. "Apart from occasional glancing correspondences of pose and manner, it is difficult to see any meaningful relationship between Thomas's heretic, disciplined verse and the earthy, disorganized Welshman who wrote it" (Korg 1). 18 Poems was to start the beginning of his publications, having written the book in separate units from earlier works, most of the poems seemed to still share an overwhelming theme. "Many of them undertake, either explicitly or by implication, the same theme: the way in which the dialectic of life and death manifested in the material world finds its resolution in the absolute vision Brown 2 available to mysticism" (Korg 40). It is difficult to place one subject as the theme for any of the poems. " 18 Poems assumes a continuity between nature and the stories of Christ and Adam" (Korg 42).
The semantic properties of language are possessed by the natural world to form many of Thomas's key metaphors. 18 Poems makes use of a metaphor relating this perceptiveness to waking and relating spiritual indifference, or the illusion that ordinary life is the only reality, to sleep and to dream. Most of the poems deal with states of conflicts preceding the mystical resolution. They also transcend individual identity through cosmic reality by generalizing or by the use of imagery and vocabulary. He uses personal statements as dramatic monologue. Last he includes the destructive spiritual aspects and the complexity of death.
Dylan's second poetry book, Twenty-Five Poems, was very similar to his first book, being that most of the poems had been written before the publication of his pervious book. Many portrayed the same cosmic conditions that he loved to write about. As Thomas matured, so did his themes of poetry. "Immortal companionship of matter and spirit" (Korg 62). In spite of his obscurities the complexity of controlled relationships is being illustrated. "Thomas borrows elements from the tow fields indiscriminately to embody the various aspects of his subjects: the duality of time as it is manifested in the alternation of the seasons" (Korg 67).
The Bible was one of the few influences Thomas was willing to acknowledge. He made use of its stories to dramatize some of his own work. "Relationships with other people and with external scenes and events as Brown 3 episodes in the drama of spiritual life" (Korg 70). As Thomas learns to accept experiences rather than insisting upon the variety of forms it assumes in the fullness of time, his works become simpler and more direct. "These later poems were usually written in response to some particular experience rather than to experience in general. Their points of departure are intimate and local rather than cosmic" (Korg 73). In the poems of this period the lover is condemned to an essential betrayal. "Ordinary events, humble folk, and local scenery, together with the compassion and tenderness these things evoke, occupy the foreground of these poems" (Korg 82). These poems are more finished, more elaborate, and certainly more compassionate, than the ones earlier in his career.
His last poems depicted a definitive change. "Poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God" (Korg 91). "The renewal of earth after some mysterious universal catastrophe" (Korg 95). Thomas began to use essential images and impressions held loosely with a syntactic framework. Thomas's four longer poems show the views of the mystic in the real world. The Altarwise by owl-light sequence is an intricately ambiguous, punning fabric in which Thomas carries his linguistic and rhetorical virtuosity to extremes, producing a result both more complex and more obscure than any of the other works.
Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait is a lighthearted, nimble, and fantastic narrative Brown 4 depending primarily on symbolic and allegorical events, though it does have some of Thomas's private verbal and metaphorical effects. A Winter's Tale bears some resemblance to his prose fantasies. It combines realistic and imaginary elements in a verse narrative free of linguistic intensities, embodying some of the constants of myth and folklore. Finally, Vision and Prayer resembles some of the other poems dealing with childbirth as a promise of spiritual deliverance, but it is a fuller development of this theme, involving a process of conversion; it has, in addition, a device used nowhere else by Thomas: shaped stanzas. (Korg 100). Thomas also focuses on the midwinter rebirth legends from primitive culture, which is the return of the spring. Along with Christian myths and other religion: birth, sacrifice, light and darkness. "He had the poetic gift and everybody knew it" (Wintle) Dylan was as productive a writer of stories as he was of poems. "Thomas's fiction may be divided sharply into classification: Vigorous fantasies in poetic style, a genre he discontinued after 1939, and straightforward, objective narratives" (Korg 121). "The main characters are madmen, simpletons, fanatics, lechers, and poets in love: people enslaved by the dictates of feelings" (Korg 121).
The settings for most of his stories are similar; a seaside Welsh town called Llareggub. Thomas uses a narrative style that blends imagined and actual worlds together. "The hallucinatory technique advances so far that it is no longer Brown 5 possible-or desirable-to disentangle imagined from actual episodes" (Korg 127). "The protagonist in all the stories is clearly Thomas himself, though the stories are narrated indifferently in first and third persons and though each presents him at a different age" (Korg 133). He only completed four scripts but worked on several others as a writer of films. He wrote documentaries for the Ministry of Information during his wartime job. "Thomas took work writing scripts for propaganda films during World War II, at which time he also began to participate in radio dramas and readings for the BBC" (Poet's Corner). "Cinematic writing made few demands on Thomas's real literary gifts, but it did show that he had an unexpected capacity for adapting himself to the new form, and for persevering with extended projects until they were complete" (Korg 137).
By the end of his script writing career, Thomas had too many unfinished scripts or aborted projects. "Dylan Thomas seems destined to occupy a double place in literary history" (Korg 143). Thomas was a craftsman of language as well as a visionary. Dylan Thomas's undeniable originality has set him apart from most people, but he had something in common with nearly every great poet, story writer, and film-writer, his own style. Brown 6 Works Cited Korg, Jacob.
Dylan Thomas. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. "Dylan Thomas. " Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjast (1999). web "Dylan Thomas. " Poet's Corner, Gale Group (2000). web cn / thoms bio .
htm. Wintle, Justin. "Drink, Mimicry and Genius to Order: Justin Wintle on Dylan Thomas, the Bad Boy of Fitzrovia. " Financial Times (London) 4 Sept. 1999: 04.
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