Noris williams' undermilkwowood is a life's work to some degree. The key moment is when he writes for is commission by the ba b c in 19 forty four colonels of speech, acts and frent forms of writing that we get in undema wood. We've even got the lines from missus ogmore pritchard, dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the draw room floor. And before you let the sun in, mind, he wipes his shoes. This is what happens with thomas a lot. I's how he re uses, recycles material from economic necessity, because he's trying to make a living.
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