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Life and Work of Dylan Thomas

33 in a letter to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson is illustrative of such fear: "Great reputations have been built upon much promise and small achievement" (Thomas 49).

The judgment of Thomas's formative years shared by various commentators is that he had a growing sense of his "vocation" in his youth. That sense as a poet has been associated with young Thomas's failure of a secondary-school graduation exam at age 16 (Ferris passim, "Thomas"). He was held back with younger students, and the following year, 1930, he quit school altogether and obtained a job as a reporter for the Swansea Daily Post.

Thomas's juvenile poetry of this period, says Ferris, was sex-obsessed but formed the basis of later, more mature work. This was also a period of sexual and lifestyle experimentation as "a bombastic adolescent provincial bohemian" (Ferris 78), and community-theatre actor. He was, however, also living at home in an increasingly tense environment. The years 1931 and 1932 contained as well the earliest of incontinent beer binges, the effects of which were ameliorated by the interventional kindness of friends and strangers. But when a friend and fellow poet persuaded him to send a poem to the New English Weekly ("And Death Shall Have No Dominion"), the newspaper published it in May 1933 (Ferris 90). Thomas was 18. That same year, another of his poems was read on the BBC as part of a poetry competition.

Over the next several months, Thomas wrote poems that would begin to define his voice, and he quit his job as a reporter. Many of these poems were collected in a volume titled 18 Poems, published in 1934, when Thomas was 19. That publication was in the background of Thomas's visiting London for the first time, staying there with his sister and her husband. When he returned to Swansea, Thomas sent poems to the publication New Verse, which rejected all of them, and to the Sunday Referee, which printed some of them, positioning them as "moder...

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Life and Work of Dylan Thomas. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:03, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683151.html