Thomas, Dylan - Life and Works

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. He was educated at Swansea Grammar School where he began to write poetry. He left school at the age of sixteen and he divided his time playing for the Swansea Little Theatre, working as a newspaper reporter and writing poems. His first volume of poetry, "Eighteen Poems", was published in 1934 and had an immediate impact on literary critics because of its unusual, violent and brilliant imagery. These poems examined the complexities of feeling; in fact, Dylan Thomas's task was centered on an attempt at unraveling the mysterious relationship between the perpetual cycles of birth and death, regeneration and destruction both in nature and in man's physical and psychological features.

He moved to London in 1936 and published his second volume "Twenty-Five Poems". In the same year he met his future wife, Caitlin Macnamara; after a period of turbulent nomadism, they married and went to live in Wales, in a fishing village. His last collection of poems, "Collected Poems 1934-1952", appeared in 1952. He also wrote some autobiographical short stories and worked for the BBC during and after the war. However Thomas was a heavy drinker and he died of alcoholism in New York in 1953, due to brain damage.
Thomas's poetry was influenced by several lines taken from other poets:
- the Blake-Wordsworth line with its praise of childhood as a state of innocence and grace;
- the Lawrence line with its concepts of total love and its preference for emotion and impulse over reason;
- the Yeats line with its Romantic view of the poet as a religious prophet;
- the Keats-Hopkins line with its originality and sensuality;
- the Eliot line with its sense of poem as drama.