Dylan Thomas
(Swansea, United Kingdom, 1914-New York, 1953) Welsh poet in the English language, undoubtedly one of the British poets of the first half of the 20th century with the greatest renown and resonance international, thanks to the profound originality of his poetry and the humor of his stories and plays.For a time he worked as a journalist for the South Wales Evening Post and, during World War II, as a screenwriter for the BBC.He became known as a poet with Eighteen poems (1934), followed by the volumes Twenty-five poems (1936) and Map of love (1939 ), with which he consolidated as the highest representative of the New Apocalypse poetic movement, which practiced a type of evocational poetry, metaphysical in tone and with a certain romantic background, in which Thomas adopted the role of poet-prophet.He reached his poetic plenitude with the volume Deaths and Births (1946).Author of an autobiographical volume in which he defends his aesthetic conceptions, Portrait of the puppy artist (1904), he also wrote various radio and film scripts.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas completed his basic education at a Grammar School in his native Wales, the school where his father taught, and he already knew during his childhood the powerful attraction of poetry.An eminently precocious poet, at the age of twelve he astonished relatives and friends with his compositions, of strong originality.When he finished his secondary school studies he traveled to London, and a year later his first book appeared, Eighteen poems (1934), published after winning an award organized by the magazine Sunday Referee .He was nineteen years old when it was published, and included thirteen poems written between 1933 and 1934 and another five composed from May to October 1934.He refused to undertake university studies and preferred a self-taught training
To the east awarded and little It was followed by Twenty-five poems (1936) and Map of love (1939).In 1936 he married a humble Irish girl, Caitlin Macnamara, with whom he would have two sons and a daughter, and settled in Laugahrne, in a house facing the sea.His name appeared with increasing frequency in contemporary poetic anthologies, and it grew in the admiration of critics and poets.However, as often happens (and something also because of the tumultuous character of the writer, genuine and intolerable bohemian and heavy drinker), his economic situation was always difficult; This is revealed by the letters of Thomas that we know, in which eager requests for loans and aid of all kinds appear continually.
At that time he wrote the lyrical-narrative texts of the Portrait of a puppy artist (1940), a collection of ten stories, largely autobiographical, that describe the provincial world in that unfold and recall in transparent, though fragmentary images, the poet's first childhood experiences, from the days of games and fabulous carefreeness until the moment when, still in his teens, he entered the city's newspaper as a reporter.Also from those years is his most beautiful and well-known collection of poems, Deaths and Births (1946), which includes the most representative compositions of his maturity.The dominant themes of this volume are the longing for the happy age, for simple and familiar affections, evoked with elegiac accents, and the painful awareness of the war years.
Dylan Thomas and Caitlin Macnamara
Their personal voice and the powerful pull of their sonority made their public readings and recordings for the BBC famous, for which made four tours of the United States to read his poetry in colleges and universities.During the fourth of his travels, in 1953, he suffered an alcoholic coma after an intense and prolonged depression and died in a New York hospital at the age of 39.Although the turbulent final stage of his life may have contributed to a special appreciation of him, there is no doubt about his importance as a poet or his high rhetorical gifts.
His Collected Poems ( Complete Poems ) were released in 1952 and comprise his entire poetic production up to that year, plus seven unpublished poems.Thomas also wrote the screenplay for The Doctor and the Devils (1953), the radio comedy Under Milk Wood ( Under the Milky Forest , 1954 , awarded the Italy prize this year), the incomplete novel Adventures in the Skin-Trade (1955, posthumous), and two volumes of essays, radio conversations and narratives entitled respectively Quite Early One Morning (1954) and A Prospect of the Sea (1955, posthumous).
Dylan Thomas belongs to a generation of poets who already pointed out their concerns shortly before World War II, but who after it became mature.With Henry Treece, Anne Ridler, David Gascoyne and others, Thomas participated (although with great independence) in the poetic movement called "New Apocalypse", a group that reacted against the previous generation, the one that became famous around 1930 and that is known like the Oxford generation: WH Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender belonged to it.Faced with this generation, which preferred realism, social themes and political satire, and which derived, albeit with reservations, from the bleak and critical attitude of Eliot's Wasteland , that of Dylan Thomas revalues the creative power of the imagination and the great enlightening function that the everyday and the mythical world, intermingled, have for poetry.
Thomas refines his lyrics of everything that, according to his poetic theory, is bastard: prosaic, non-transfigured evocation of reality, colloquial language and everything that is sordid and unhinged and does not retain an elemental breath of pure, romantic lyricism.If sometimes the tear and vulgarity of the modern world appear in his verses, it is in an indirect, symbolic, anti-eliotian way, as if to justify that he is not an esthete and that he lives the problems of his time.In the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the fusion of his vital ardor and his creative and almost fabulous verb creates an amazing world: it is the illuminated path of William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud and other visionaries.Crystal clearness, however, is not your norm; it has rightly been described as obscure and has been ascribed to the poetic line that goes from Vaughan to Hopkins and W.B.Yeats.
As for many artists, surrealism supposed for him a sensory and expressive liberation, although the tremendous imaginative force and the sense of musicality and rhythm were already his own.The world of Dylan Thomas is close to a certain surrealism, but more passionate and human, less dreamlike and without the burden of impure elements that the subconscious contributes.In his world, life and death are the extremes of the same arc, the effective counterpoint that moves his creative energy.For the poet the mere existence is already something extraordinary, a surprise renewed every minute, and he sings his joys and his sorrows as something inseparable, as a glorious gift that must be thanked to the Creator who gives it to us.The ontological mystery, the passion for man, the prenatal dreams, the paradisiac childhood, are themes that Thomas evokes with bardic magic.The allusive or cryptic meaning of some of his metaphors, images or stanzas makes him related to the Bible and to Joyce.
His verb is so pristine, so virginal, that it seems to come directly from the unclouded sources of language.Each verse is an adventure, poetic logic allows everything to be a continuous surprise.The reader intuits that the poem has been conceived without a prior scheme; the creative impulse has set him in motion like a fire that advances with all its wings.That is why there are no intermediate or gray areas in his poems, of rest, or little inspired.The heart of his world are the images that follow one another, contradict each other, interfere and destroy each other.Poet of authentic inspiration and creator of vigorous and colorful images, in his attempt to achieve, through chaos, a spontaneous and total expression of the conscious and unconscious human elements, he knew how to transfer his main obsessions to his verses and managed to endow them of magical resonances and great breath.
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