I think also it's really important to think of him as an international figure on a poetic stage. You you can see his ideas being grappled with with the beatneks, if you think about the movement from the academy out into the street. What is point with fit into the public sphere? How does it engage with its audience? He really did think about that idea of orality in terms of the speech, but also the aural,. In terms of the ear, in terms of listening audience as well. And he makes the distinction several times through his life, one that works from words and one that works towards words.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953). He wrote some of his best poems before he was twenty in the first half of his short, remarkable life, and was prolific in the second half too with poems such as those set in London under the Blitz and reworkings of his childhood in Swansea, and his famous radio play Under Milk Wood (performed after his death). He was read widely and widely heard: with his reading tours in America and recordings of his works that sold in their hundreds of thousands after his death, he is credited with reviving the act of poetry as performance in the 20th century.
With
Nerys Williams
Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at University College Dublin
John Goodby
Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University
And
Leo Mellor
The Roma Gill Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson