SYNOPSIS
The poetry of Dylan Thomas, like the novels of James
Joyce, has become a rich quarry for scholars and critics on
both the sides of the Atlantic to mine fresher and fresher
elements of poetic beauty.
During the last thirty years,
many painstaking and illuminating attempts have been made
to explore, analyse and explicate the thematic content and
technical nuances of the iceberg-like Collected Poems:
1934-1952 of Dylan Thomas.
However, the problems of
reinterpretation of his themes and re-assessment of his
craftsmanship are yet inexhaustible due to various reasons.
First, the riches of the poetic beauty of Collected Poems
is infinite.
The dim thematic perceptions are so obsure
and the technical skill with which they are expressed so
intractable and elusive that many a Thomas critic has partly
failed to arrive at any definite conclusion with regard to
his status and quality as a modern poet.
Nor has there been
any final assessment of his thematic contents or of his
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technical achievement.
Secondly, most of the Thomas
criticism published so far has been desultory and frag­
mentary: Although numerous scholars have explicated
individual poems or have interpreted separate themes like
death, time, love etc., or have presented studies in
individual items of technique such as prosody, imagery,
symbolism etc., most of these interpretations and studies,
barring a few full-length volumes like those by W.Y.Tindall,
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W.T.Moynihan and Ralph Maud, have neither been consolidated,
nor circumspective, nor unbiased*
Thirdly, there is found
in the available Thomas criticism, an absence of standard
classification of the themes and technical devices which
may lead to adequate evaluation*
A consolidated study,
therefore, of both the thematic content and the technical
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devices of all the poems together, is the present need of
critical inquiry.
The primary aim and end of this thesis is
to penetrate and explicate the thematic content of all the
poems, to classify and explain all the technical devices in
the poetry of Dylan Thomas and to present harmony between
themes and themes, between sound and sense and between
themes and technique.
Besides being fragmentary, the Thomas criticism
published so far is either ’new* or ‘linguistic* or
‘traditional*, but seldom the blend of all the three.
A comprehensive view of Thomas*s poetic achievement can
be available only by applying various methods of criticism,
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‘traditional* and ‘new*.
are cumulatively used.
In this thesis these methods
As Thomas did not include the
worth-publishing poems in Collected Poems chronologically,
the chronology of publication of these poems is not taken
into account while grouping the poems thematically and
while cla ssifying them in accordance with the items of
technique.
In brief, the themes and technique are not
analysed poem-wise but group-wise.
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For the sake of critical convenience, the corpus ©f
the whole thesis is divided into four parts#
The two
chapters of the first part deal with the literary* life
of Dylan Thomas and with the literary influences on his
poetic talent respectively.
The second part consisting of
four chapters, is devoted to the thematic interpretations
of his poems around the four main theme clusters: creation,
growth, destruction and regeneration.
The third part of
this thesis is concerned with the four-fold technical
achievement of Dylan Thomas, dealing witty its Generic,
Metrical, Structural and Linguistic aspects respectively.
The last part is devoted to the listing of conclusions.
The synoptic view of the contents of these parts aid the
rationale behind their design are given in the following
pages.
A study of the themes and technique in the poetry of
Dylan Thomas necessarily involves the exploration of various
related and unrelated areas of poetic creation.
As the
poetic output of any poet is the result of a peculiar
psychology of the poet and as his mind is prepared by the
circumstances in which he is placed, the study of his life
in all its aspects cannot be extricated, as the *new critics*
usually do, from his poetic creation.
complimentary to each other.
The study of both is
The milieu and the moment have
directly or indirectly influenced the psychological, intellectual and creative development of Dylan Thomas.
So, far
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the interpretation of his themes and for the analysis of his
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poetic techniquet a purely literary* biography containing
only those episodes which contributed to his poetic creation,
is felt necessary.
In the first chapter of the first part, the poet’s own
life as placed in the contemporary natural, economic,
political and literary surroundings is depicted chiefly to
point out influences ©n his poetic talent,
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attempt has
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been made here to disengage the legend of Thomas the man
from Thomas the poet and to reconstruct, with the help of
his letters, speeches, poems and autobiographical prose,
the image of one who wrote strikingly original and fresh
poetry most industriously and devotedly.
The influences
exerted by the poet’s home, Welsh natural surroundings, his
reading, experiences as an editor of the school magazine
and as a newspaper correspondent and his trips io London
and .America occupy the major portions of this chapter.
It
is found that some peculiar qualities of Thomas’s education,
love, .alcoholism, friendship, adolescent wanderings, his
fear of critics and diseases, his financial hardships and
his poetry readings in America have made indelible mark on
his poetic output and career.
The Welsh heritage of Bible-
reading, preaching, poetry-festivals, chapel-going and
chanting of hymns have influenced his chanting rhythm and
sterner craftsmanship.
The pastoral surroundings of
Laugharne and the Welsh Non-conformity have given him a
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peculiar insight into the elements of earthly existence,
the effects of time on it and the appropriate images in
which to express his feelings about them.
But there appears
some contrast between his public image and poetic personality.
There have also been some very significant political, social
and literary upheavals in the European continent, such as
the depression, unemployment and the world war, to which
Thomas reacted in unusual ways in his poetry.
These are
described in this chapter for settling the background of
his poetic creation and of the germination of some of his
themes.
It is established that Thomas did not remain
poetically adolescent or innocent, as is supposed.
He did
really develop from the intense imaginative and intellectual
searching of boyhood years through the confusion and comple­
xity of the disturbed adolescence to the religious acceptance
and philosophic mellowness of the later years.
His poetic
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personality, like his poetry, is full of paradoxes and contra­
dictions.
A poet of Keatsian negative capability, he presented
the religious, sexual, metaphysical and visionary experiences
of this-wordly life of, creation, destruction and regeneration.
The second chapter of this part deals with the influences
of the past and contemporary English literature on Thomas’s
themes and technique.
From the Welsh Bible-reading and bardic
chanting he drew incantation, conscious craftsmanship and
rhetorical flair.
The Biblical myths became for him the
springboard for absorbing the image of man in relation to
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the cosmic existence.
The metaphysical poets like Donne
coloured his vision of birth, sex, love and death.
Thomas
has a meditative and imaginative kinship with Donne, Vaughan
and Crash aw.
Of the later poets, Blake held remarkable sway
on Thomas’s poetic vision and technique.
Echoes of Blake's
themes and images are heard in Thomas's poetry.
They are
illustrated and discussed to substantiate his kinship with
Blake.
Thomas's verbal magic, his flare for compound words
and his metrical experiments have Keatsian and Hopkinsian
heritage.
Thomas's debt to Hopkins is noticed in matters of
alliterative devices, incantatory power, elaborate structure,
introspective mood, compounds, sprung rhythm and auditory
effects.
References are also made to the casual influences
of the 'moderns' like Rimbaud, Yeats and Lawrence.
After
explaining the major influence of the non-literary author,
viz., Freud on Thomas's sexual interpretations, imagery and
dreamy mood, it is pointed out that Thomas remains in the
tradition of Donne, Blake, Keats and Hopkins and does not
fall in any of the contemporary trends of the imagists,
symbolists, socialites, socialists and Surrealists, and
that although his poetry manifests the influences of
different poets, he stands as a type by himself.
A separate introduction to the second part on themes
is felt necessary because of the significance and vastness
of the topic.
The intricate design of Thomas's themes and
the method of grouping poems on the basis of the themes
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require clarification.
In the introduction to this-part,
it is maintained that because Thomas's poetry possesses
opaque, dense and intractable thematic content, a sharper
classification and more penetrating interpretation of the
poems is needed.
It is found that beneath the disordered
contents of the separate poems of Collected Poems, there is
an unalienable link or schematic- organisation of four
dominant themes of cosmic existence, viz., Creation, Growth,
Destruction and Regeneration.
Although the separate units
of the poems contain a number of sensations, 'crudities',
•doubts' and thoughts, their strains and patterns of meaning,
crystallise into these four timeless and universal elements
which operate perpetually on the animate and inanimate
objects.
The 'Introduction' brings out the salient features
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of the dominant theraeg. A poem of Thomas is composed of a
host of contrasting themes that have both physical and
spiritual character.
At the centre of these universal
themes is man, the metaphor for all things.
In the last
section of the 'Introduction', the four chapters on the
four themes are broadly outlined.
In the first chapter, on the theme of creation, the .
poems bunching themselves under the classification of
different types, i.e., cosmic creation, sexual creation and
aesthetic creation, are analysed according to the themes
they portray.
As Thomas felt that creations of child, tree
or po&m are governed by the same principles, one type of
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creation can be interpreted in terms of another.
creation i,s the epitome of all creation.
Sexual
Thomas's poetry
contains the Blakean and Freudian idea that the whole
universe is one body tirelessly creating and re-creating
objects.
These poems of creation depict three stages of
creation.
They are conception, gestation and birth.
Creation begins with conception and becomes visible with
birth.
Birth unites the inner and outer existence.
The
poems falling under these three stages are grouped and
interpreted thematically to show how Thomas was deeply
interested in the vision of creation.
In a number of
poems, he envisions creation as a matter of pain, agony,
adventure - all worth-having and natural.
The second chapter of this part deals with the theme
of' only two types of growth - human and aesthetic. Aesthetic
growth, especially tfce growth of poems, is depicted by
Thomas in terms of human growth which has the phases of
childhood, adolescence and manhood.
Childhood, according
to Thomas, is the happiest of all the stages of human life.
;
He celebrates it in a number of poems for its attributes of
innocence, wonder, freedom, curiousity and imaginative power
To the poet, a child's knowledge is more poetic than the
adult*s.
The poems of adolescence, however, also present
moods of frustration and disillusionment, because as human
beings begin to grow, they begin to experience, as his poems
show, hardships, awareness of sex-potency, dreaminess and
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self-destructive illusions.
Thomas*s poems of manhood
chiefly deal with man as an embodiment of the animate
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existence.
A creation away from the topical and social
to the realm of introspective personalism is noticed in
the poems of manhood.
In these poems all kinds of experi­
ences of the emotional and sexual man are communicated.
The poems of manhood are further classified as poems of
fear of death and poems of man*s public and political
activities.
Loss of innocence, deepening of consciousness
and dominance of sex are the major strains of these poems
of manhood.
It is noticed that Thomas has not very seriously
tackled the social and political problems of man.
Another
group of poems, dealing with the process of poetic group,
is analysed and interpreted to show Thomas's views on the
growth of poetic sensibility, his own growing awareness of
the reality of subject-matter and craftsmanship.
In the
last section of this chapter, a few poems which present
the activities of the agents of growth, viz., Nature, the
unknown 'force* and time, which are also responsible for
creation and destruction, are thematically interpreted.
Birds, animals, trees, landscapes and flowers in nature
enable the animal beings to grow physically and provoke
aesthetic sensibility and the imagination of creative
artists.
Thomas's obsession with the idea ©f death has produced
many elegies and poems of destruction.
They are classified
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and interpreted in the third chapter of this part.
Thomas’s
approach to death changed from fear through defiance to serene
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acceptance.
His poems of destruction generally reveal the
poet's notion that destruction is cosmic and is necessary for
the continuation of earthly existence.
The poems coming uncier
this group are further classified as poems of the stages, forms
and agents of destruction.
These poems convey that death is a
journey starting from birth and that everything in the world
is death-dominated.
Death is held to be a pristine darkness.
Another idea that these poems bring forth emphatically is that
death being a kind of migration or transformation from one
body into another, it is mainly responsible for effecting the
unity among the living and the dead, the animate and the
inanimate and the animal and vegetable objects.
stage of destruction, is all-pervading.
Decay, a
The poems of the
next stage of destruction, viz., death are grouped as poems
of death by killing, and poems of war.
The poems of destruction are also classified on the basis
of the agents of destruction, such as sex, war, time and
’force'•
Every poem coming under these various groups is
separately interpreted in the context of destruction. Various
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poems present the activity of one or two agents of destruction.
War, regarded as the agent of destruction, has been severely
treated', in the poems of war.
Time also destroys physical
energy, saps growth and causes natural death.
The poems
grouped as poems of time as the agent of destruction show
/
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that the process of destfuction embraces universal objects.
The poems of sex as a destructive agent are many and convey
the lass of energy due to sex.
The fourth and last chapter of this part interprets the
poems of regeneration, which for Thomas is the transformation
of one form into another.
a kind of immortality.
Continual regeneration, constitutes
Thomas* s views on regeneration are
based on pantheism, which underlies his vision of corporate
life of man and nature.
The chapter analyses the poems of
each group based on various agents of regeneration, such as
sex, love, art and time.
The groups based on the forms of
regeneration, such as cosmic, natural and human, are also
illustrated and analysed in this chapter.
It is made clear that all the chapters on themes present
Thomas's indirect leaning to the Christian and Hindu philosophy
of earthly existence.
His poems also present some scientific
and mythic realities.
The introduction to Part III states the necessity of
understanding the technical achievement of Thomas for
adequate apprehension of the thematic content of his poems.
It gives the background for Thomas’s craftsmanship and his
art of fusing form with content and sound with sense.
The
work done on various technical aspects of his poetry being
more or less fragmentary and piecemeal, the necessity for
the consolidated study of all the aspects of his craftsmanship
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has been emphasised.
Thomas’s attitude to the craft of
poetry, his theory of -reading poetry aloud and his methods
of composition are discussed in this introduction to pave
the way for right appreciation of his technique.
The last
section of the introduction outlines the scope of the follow­
ing foar chapters devoted to items like generic aspects,'
structural devices, diction, imagery and figures of speech
and syntactic and stylistic, features noticed in Thomas’s
poetry.
In the first chapter of this part, attempts for the
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first time are made to prove the predominance and peculia­
rities of the lyrical aspects of Thomas’s poetry.
In the
first section, the major characteristics of lyric poetry,
such as the personality element, inspiration, musicality,
free and aesthetically communicable form, intensity of
emotion, brevity and freshness of feelings are applied to
Thomas’s poems and are researched in many of his poems.
Then, his lyrics are broadly classified as lyrics of vision,
lyrics of thought, pure lyrics and dramatic lyrics.
In the
second section, it is shown that his poems are in revolt
against the contemporary classicism as they have romantic,
bardic strains, fresh emotionalism and musicality.
In the
third section of this chapter, the Romantic qualities such
as sincerity, intensity, subjective impersonalism, strangeness
added to beauty, freshness of response, inspiration, nostalgia,
mythmaking, dreamy imagination, magical view of the world,
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absolute creative power, etc. are pointed out in various
poems of Dylan Thomas.
In the next section, the characteri­
stics of Surrealism are searched in his poems.
It is found
that unlike the Surrealists, Thomas did not intend to break
down the order and did not reject the aesthetic values.
On
the contrary, he consciously created forms and imagery.
The
last section of this chapter groups Thomas’s lyrics into the
treditional types of lyric, such as the song, the sonnet,
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the elegy, the pastoral, the ode, the idyll and the ballad.
For the first time such investigation into the lyrical
qualities of Thomas’s poetry is made.
The second chapter of this part deals with the metrical
aspects of Thomas's poems.
The auditory correlative of Thomas’s
poetry is discussed under various metrical items like rhythm,
stanzaic patterns, line-lengths, pauses, alliteration and '
rhymes.
With all these means Thomas has presented both the
traditional,bardic interest in music of verse and the modern
vogue of the fusion of sound and sense.
evokes and elevates the sense.
to cadence.
Rhythm in his poems
It is dexterously transmuted
His poetry has hwyl and sprung rhythm.
He has
also successfully attempted stanzas of varied numbers of
lines and metrical forms, such as the ballad metre, t£rza
rima, villanelle, ottava rima and sonnet.
But he made
alterations in these forms according to his needs.
As an
architect of poetic sounds, he has artistically used a
*
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variety of rhyme-schemes like regular rhymes, internal rhymes,
broken rhymes, near-rhymes, consonance and assonance.
Thomas’s mastery as a craftsman is noticed in the third
chapter of this part in his use of many structural devices.
After defining the poetic structure in the light of Thomas’s
views and those by other critics, an altogether fresh attempt
is made here to analyse and illustrate Thomas’s own use of
various structural devices, such as paradox, irony, paralle­
lism, repetition, contrast, inversion, openings and closures.
With these varied structural devices, Thomas has concentrated
on the union of music.and meaning.
He has used these devices
with such conscious skill and critical force that every poem
becomes structurally and thematically organic.
In the later
part of this chapter, Thomas’s ’dialectical method’ of
structuring a poem with the help of generative images has
been applied to his poems to indicate how he applied his
theory to his own poetry.
The fourth chapter of this part deals with diction,
ornamental figures and syntactic and stylistic features of
Thomas's poetry.
devoted.
To each of these a separate section is
Thomas’s characteristic obsession with words impelled
him-to test the colours, sounds, sizes and meanings of words.
A very conscious artist, he selected poetically rich words
for economy, compression, sound, strangeness and suggestivity.
These qualities of his words are examined in the first section.
In addition, the grammatical functions of pronouns, demonstraV
tives, epithets, archaisms- and cliches have been examined.
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The recurrence of some favourite words of Thomas establishes
his concentration on the major themes discussed in the
second part of this thesis.
In this section, the richness,
recurrence, peculiarity and ’tbinginess' of his words are
also examined.
The second section of this last chapter specifically
deals with Thomas* s craftsmanship as revealed in his use
of symbols, metaphor, puns, allegory and aphorism.
After
discussing the elements of Thomas's symbolism, it has been
pointed out that Thomas’s symbols have vividness, emotional
power, suggestivity and psychological connotations.
His
metaphors indicate thought and character of things and
embellish ideas.
They are made out of complex resemblances
and fantastic analogies.
Here, the grammar of Thomas’s
metaphors is considered in the context of their poetic
effect.* After discussing Thomas’s strange similes, persoi
nifications, apostrophes, puns and allegory, it has been
concluded that the remote associations in his images,
symbols and metaphors have created the much-debated
obscurity.
The last section of this chapter is devoted to the
syntactic and stylistic features of Thomas's language.
His
syntactic deviations are explained under the items of broken
syntax, phrasal deviations, periphrasis, inversions, neglect
of punctuation and such other surprising linguistic liberties.
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In Thomas, syntactic repetitions serve the purpose of
emphasis, freshness of communication and organisation of
the units of sentences.
He uses ungrammatical and semi-
grammatical utterances which present an unusual height of
technical craftsmanship and which sometimes give the appea­
rance of surrealistic modes.
The coherence of form,
structure and unique assemblage of several syntactic and
semantic categories in Thomas have given rise to his
peculiar style which may partly pass for 1 grand*-ness,
Celticism, Baroque manner and Surrealism.
The elements
of these styles are detected in a number of Thomas*s poems.
The Conclusion in the last part of the thesis gives a
categorical list of findings from the discussion of themes
and technique in the poetry of Dylan Thomas.