FERN HILL

FERN HILL

DylanThomas

Dylan Thomas ( 1914 -1953) remains one of the legendary figures in 20th Century poetry , both for the impact his visionary , musical verse ,and for the notoriety of his private life , Born in Swansea ,Wales l ,Thomas was named after a charactering the collection of medieval Welsh tales .The Mabinogion . 

His middle name ,malaise , had been adopted by his great uncle ,a well known preacher -poet .The christening now feels prophetic in its combination of Welsh literary inheritance and the powers of oration Thomas ‘ own father was an English teacher at Swansea Grammar School  ; though he had once harbored poetic ambitions .During  his childhood, the city life of Swansea was contrasted by summer holidays spent at his maternal  aunt’s farm in Carmarthenshire ,the land scape proving vital  to his imaginative life in such poems as ‘ Fern Hill ‘.A short stint as a reporter for the south Wales Evening post proved unsuccessful and so in 1934 Thomas moved to London .by this time he was already writing some of the poems on which his later reputation would be based , including ‘And Death Shall Have no Dominion ‘ and t” the Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower ‘ .HIs firs t book , 18 poems , appeared in 1934 and made a critical impassioned style was refreshingly at odds with the cooler tones of poets like Auden and Spender who were dominant at the time .Whilst Thomas ‘ youth established his image as a prodigy who should be indulged ,his hard drinking and boisterous behavior in London was the start of the darker aspect to his legend .

In 1936 Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara and they were married the following year .their  tempestuous relationship ,fraught with mutual infidelity , money problems and alcohol abuse  also played it’s part in the Dylan Thomas mythology . by 1943 the couple had three children and mounting debt .During this period he continued to write some of his greatest t poems ,particularly those that appeared in the 1946  collection ,the somber war - influenced Deaths and Entrances from which his two Archive e - featured poems are taken .Thomas was also distracted by the need to earn money and radio became one regular source of employment with frequent broadcasts for the BBC .In 1950 Thomas fulfilled a long -standing ambition to tour America, giving readings which attracted large audiences .However ,the social aspect of the tour encouraged his drinking and meant he returned to the UK without much money .Thomas made two further trips to the States  with similar results : increasing g fame . coupled with drunkenness and financial imprudence - a very modern kind of celebrity .the tours prompted a rift between himself and Caitlin who suspected his motives and it was fatal trip to New York in October 1953 . After several bouts of drinking ,Thomas was taken ill at the Chelsea Hotel  on 4 th November and was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital the same day .He died on 9th November the cause of death being given as a combination of pneumonia and pressure on the bran due to alcohol.

Dylan Thomas ‘ detractors accuse him of being drunk on language as well as whiskey , both whilst there’s no doubt that the sound of language is central to his style , he was also a disciplined writer who re- drafted  obsessively .His technical skill is evident  in his two Archive - featured poems ,both of which are written in tight rhyme schemes . Nevertheless, it is the music of his poems ,as much as their themes of lost innocence nostalgia for childhood and death , which has proved so seductive to readers and listeners . HIs pleasure in the sensual quality of language was embedded in his childhood experience when both his parents read aloud to him from an early age .( It was also his parents ‘ middle class ambition that meant Thomas ‘ Welsh accent was expunged through elocution lessons .) As an adult , honed by his work in radio , Thomas became a skilled reader of his poetry , deploying his 1949 captures Thomas at the height of his powers ,but also in the process of questing his own reading style , his comments revealing an awareness that t could easily tip over into melodrama .This is not the case in this instance though ,the intimacy of the studio setting allowing Thomas to turn the volume down, as it were , ending his great poem to the vocations of the poet, ‘ In MY Craft or sullen Art ‘ on a beautifully judged quiet note. After listening too this recording it’s  hard not to agree with the New York Times which said of Thomas at the time   of his American tours : “ Dylan Thomas ‘s voice has added a new dimension to literary history . He will surely be remembered as the first  in modern literature  toe both and speaker of poetry  … the typical reader will become entranced after hearing him recite .”