In late thomas, he is scared by the war. I mean, venn watkins said it was a moral shock from which he never recovered. And he incorporates allusions to the holocost in a refusal to mourn. The first draft of that poem does not have the words zion and synagoguein. But then along comes the cold war, and his whole later project in poetry,. just as in the opera, as you say, is something called country heaven - about the extinguishing of the earth in a nuclear holycost. It's about people in a in country heaven remembering their lives they had in this extinguished world.
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