Dylan Thomas' Attitude Towards Society

Dylan Thomas' Attitude Towards Society

Swansea was the "ugly lovely town"1of Dylan Thomas's childhood and it

was through his explorations of Swansea and the surrounding area that

he formed his first impressions of childhood. Thomas grew up during

the depression after the First World War and during this time there

was massive unemployment in Swansea and this would have influenced his

outlook on society, but although Thomas's poems often contained bleak

imagery he was not a war poet and his poems dealt with personal issues

such as innocence, experience and death rather than being political.

Thomas's death was an epitaph of his life, his use of alcohol to

escape social structures resulting in his premature death

characterises Thomas's struggle against structures but his final

acceptance of them. He described his youth as the "years before I

knew I was happy"2, which can be interpreted as being before he lost

his innocence and became aware of society and it's restrictions.

Some critics have argued that Thomas considered being a poet as a job

and that what he wrote didn't actually mean anything personal to him.

Karl Shapiro's impression of Thomas as someone who deliberately aimed

"to keep people from understanding his poems" is inaccurate as Thomas

himself argued that "Much of the obscurity is due to rigorous

compression"3 this is also the "clotting" that Tindall described. One

of Thomas's largest problems in accepting society was its use of

language and the fact that in expressing something using words some of

"the colour"4 - the meaning - was lost. Thomas felt that in putting

his ideas down on to paper they lost some of their clarity and in his

poetry he aspired for his writing to be as precise as the or...

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...nce and nature go

hand-in-hand. Shapiro's disparagement of Thomas's style could be seen

as being nave; Thomas employed an individual approach to poetry and

this approach encapsulated Thomas's attitude towards society.

Thomas spent his life struggling against what he saw as the "chains"

of society's structures but also his acceptance that they are

necessary and this can be seen in his poetry by the outward appearance

that they lack structure but the deeper structures found within them.

Thomas tried to confuse critics so that they couldn't pigeonhole him

into a certain type of poem, not only this but he also disliked

writing titles to his poems as that categorised them - in some

publications of '18 Poems' the poems are just numbered. His unique

style and experimentation caused him to become a cultural icon, and he

is probably the most famous welsh poet.