The Works Of Dylan Thomas

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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.

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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' stories 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

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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