Life and Work of Dylan Thomas

To discuss the life and career of Thomas is almost inevitably to include the observation that he died in what might have been the prime of his professional and personal life. Dylan Thomas's poetic gifts flourished despite a persistent pattern of self-destructive behavior that did the opposite of cherish and nurture them. The result was that his inability to break the destructive cycles in his life truncated what many critics take to be a rich and innovative literary voice.

From his earliest years Thomas recognized that he was an adept at manipulating language to poetic purpose. Born in Swansea, Wales, he was the only son and second of two surviving children of a schoolmaster whose dreams of a life of scholarly order and elegance were met by modest means and a propensity for drink and embellishment (Ferris 34ff). That same propensity was typical of Dylan Thomas, who from an early age focused on developing his poetry, to the exclusion of virtually all other academic interests ("Thomas"). In this project he seems to have been coddled and protected by a doting mother (Ferris 38-39). However, Ferris speculates, based on Fre

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ople who instinctively understood the poet even though they did not always understand the poetry" (Craik 362). While it is correct to say that Thomas chose to work in the English language, not Welsh, and as a consequence was for decades ignored by his hometown of Swansea ("Sobering" 74), Ferris explains that he created poems in the mid-1930s that were structured according to Welsh verse traditions. Further, in a preface to Under Milk Wood, Jones (x-xi) declares the language of the work to be Anglo-Welsh, whatever the professional philologists might like to believe. Undoubtedly it is the case that in his poetry and in lectures and readings that he was giving as early as the 1930s, Thomas comported himself as an exemplar of the slightly dangerous, slightly uncivilized, definitely intense and romantic Celtic culture. Welsh mythic tales, called the Mabinogion, were the source of Thomas's first name, which means sea (Ferris 36). Evidence of such works as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and Under Milk Wood is that Welsh identity provided source material. Thomas's move away from Wales and into London's literary set in the mid-1930s was intellectually and professionally beneficial but personally precarious. It exacerbated an estrangement
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Approximate Word count = 2117
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)