the works of dylan thomas

Brown i.

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’ 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).