Course synopsis

This course offers the chance to study the work of a leading twentieth century writer in the locale where he was born, brought up, and arrived at creative maturity, and it includes visits to the Dylan Thomas Exhibition in Swansea and the Boat House in Laugharne. One of its main aims, however, is to question the myth of the life which has dogged past interpretations of Thomas. It will do this by re-placing his writing in its literary, historical and critical contexts. Using critical and theoretical approaches suggested by the work itself—linguistics, surrealism, psychoanalysis, theories of Gothic and the body, Welsh identity, war, popular culture and the pastoral—you will explore the ways in which Thomas developed his explosive alternative to the ironic-realist tradition of English poetry by mediating the crises of his times (the Great Depression, world war, and the Cold War) through his hybrid poetic, a blend of revolutionary modernism and traditional form. You will learn about Thomas’s radical and exciting treatment of poetic creativity, language and the self, sex and biology, religion, the child, and what we would today call green issues. The course will follow a broadly chronological trajectory, from Thomas’s first poetry collection, 18 Poems (1934) to Under Milk Wood (1954). The work will be considered under the following broad headings:

1. Thomas and his times: crisis, modernism and New Country
2. The process poetic
3. Aspects of language
4. Sex and the body
5. Surrealism, Gothic-grotesque monstrosity and hybridity: Welshness I
6. On the colour of saying
7. War, film and radio: the Second World War I
8. Writing elegy: the Second World War II
9. Thomas and Cold War pastoral: Welshness II
10. Under Milk Wood
11. Popular culture and legend: Thomas’s afterlives

Please note that between classes 6-7 and 9-10, there will be a showing of Thomas’s war films and a session for listening to a performance of Under Milk Wood, respectively. Attendance is compulsory unless you have a timetable clash.

Course Aims

To begin with, we will try to place Dylan Thomas in his historical and social contexts. In doing so you will learn how to read the early writing, notorious as it is for its alleged, and real, obscurities. You will acquire techniques for ‘opening up’ the texts, and close reading will remain the basis of what we do for the rest of the course. However detailed readings in class time will grow less necessary as you acquire the ability to ‘decode’ a Thomas poem yourself. (Please note that this means that if you miss the early classes you will put yourself at a grave disadvantage.)  After this initial phase, we will pass on to the more thematic and chronological progress mentioned above. Overall, the aim is to:

• Introduce you to Dylan Thomas’s work in all media (poetry, fiction, film, radio feature and drama), and give a sense of his development as a writer.
• Equip you with the skills necessary to tackle these different kinds of writing.
• Arm you with a number of theoretical and critical approaches to literature immanent within, or suggested by, Thomas’s writing.
• Raise awareness of the demands and rewards of modernist poetry and prose.
• Give an awareness of British poetry as an evolving discourse in the mid-twentieth century. 
• Suggest ways in which social forms and historical events are mediated in literature.
• Indicate areas of conflict and synergy between ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultural forms.
• Problematize the identification of authors with their work, and the act of writing with ‘expression’, while showing how the tactical use of ‘personal’ material may serve a writer’s strategic ends.

During the course we will distinguish between a) the historical person of Dylan Thomas, b) the reputation, or personal myth, created by him and built around him, c) the personae he adopted in his writings, and d) the texts attributed to ‘Dylan Thomas’. It is, of course, be impossible (and in some ways undesirable) to totally separate the poet as person from his work. However, personalised, myth-distorted interpretations are the bane of Thomas criticism; on this course you will be largely concerned with d), and to a lesser extent c), and you will be required to resist the urge to slide from text to moral judgement of the person of the poet or his legend.