Contents сhapter I. Life and career 1Early time 21933–1939 3Wartime, 1939–1945 4Broadcasting years 1945–1949 5American tours, 1950–1953 6Death 7Aftermath chapter II. Poetry 1Poetic style and influences 2Welsh poet 3Critical reception 4Memorials chapter

Poetic style and influences[edit]
Thomas's refusal to align with any literary group or movement has made him and his work difficult to categorise.^[170] Although influenced by the modern symbolism and surrealism movements^{[citation needed]} he refused to follow such creeds.^{[need quotation to verify]} Instead, critics^[which?] view Thomas as part of the modernism and romanticism movements,^[171] though attempts to pigeon-hole him within a particular neo-romantic school have been unsuccessful.^{[citation needed]} Elder Olson, in his 1954 critical study of Thomas's poetry, wrote of "... a further characteristic which distinguished Thomas's work from that of other poets. It was unclassifiable."^[172] Olson continued that in a postmodern age^{[clarification needed]} that continually attempted to demand that poetry have social reference, none could be found in Thomas's work,^{[citation needed]} and that his work was so obscure that critics could not explicate it.^[173]
Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night". His images appear carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations.^{[need quotation to verify]} Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore, preaching, and Sigmund Freud.^{[174][date missing][need quotation to verify]} Explaining the source of his imagery, Thomas wrote in a letter to Glyn Jones: "My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I'm afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy".^[153]
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
From "In the white giant's thigh" (1950)^[175]
Thomas's early poetry was noted^{[by whom?]} for its verbal density, alliteration, sprung rhythm and internal rhyme, and some critics detected the influence of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.^[3] This^{[clarification needed]} is attributed^{[by whom?]} to Hopkins, who taught himself Welsh and who used sprung verse, bringing some features of Welsh poetic metre into his work.^[176] When Henry Treece wrote to Thomas comparing his style to that of Hopkins, Thomas wrote back denying any such influence.^[176] Thomas greatly admired Thomas Hardy, who is regarded^{[by whom?]} as an influence.^[3][177] When Thomas travelled in America, he recited some of Hardy's work in his readings.^[177]
Other poets from whom critics believe Thomas drew influence include James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence. William York Tindall, in his 1962 study, A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas, finds comparison between Thomas's and Joyce's wordplay, while he notes the themes of rebirth and nature are common to the works of Lawrence and Thomas.^{[178][nb 11]} Although Thomas described himself as the "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive", he stated that the phrase "Swansea's Rimbaud" was coined by poet Roy Campbell.^{[179][180][nb 12]} Critics have explored the origins of Thomas's mythological pasts in his works such as "The Orchards", which Ann Elizabeth Mayer believes reflects the Welsh myths of the Mabinogion.^{[126][181][nb 13]} Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality,^[182] most clear in "Fern Hill", "In Country Sleep", "Ballad of the Long-legged Bait" and "In the White Giant's Thigh" from Under Milk Wood.
Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:
I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance ... I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.^[183]
Thomas became an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories.^[3] His first published prose work, After the Fair, appeared in The New English Weekly on 15 March 1934.^[184] Jacob Korg believes that one can classify Thomas's fiction work into two main bodies: vigorous fantasies in a poetic style and, after 1939, more straightforward narratives.^[185] Korg surmises that Thomas approached his prose writing as an alternate poetic form, which allowed him to produce complex, involuted narratives that do not allow the reader to rest.^[185]