Thesis Statement: Dylan Thomas, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty, applies his own unnecessarily complicated and obscure style of writing to his poetry, stories, and dramas.
I. Dylan's obscure poems contained elements of surrealism and personal fantasy, which is what draws readers to them to reveal the universality of the experiences with which they are concerned.
A. 18 Poems.
1. "Continuity between nature and the Stories of Christ and Adam" (Korg 42).
2. Semantic properties of language are possessed by the natural world.
3. Conflicts preceding the mystical resolution.
4. Personal statement as dramatic monologue.
5. Complexity of death.
B. Twenty-five Poems.
1. Dylan's reaction to other people.
2. "Immortal companionship of matter and spirit" (Korg 62).
3. "The duality of time as it is manifested in the alternation of the seasons" (Korg 67).
4. "Relationships with other people and with external scenes and events as episodes in the drama of spiritual life" (Korg 70).
C. Later Poems.
1. "These later poems were usually written in response to some particular experience rather than to experience in general. Their points of departure are intimate and local rather than cosmic" (Korg 73).
2. The lover is condemned to an essential betrayal.
3. "Ordinary events, humble folk, and local scenery, together with the compassion and tenderness these things evoke, occupy the foreground of these poems" (Korg 82).
D. Last Poems.
1. "Poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God" (Korg 91).
2. "The renewal of earth after some mysterious universal catastrophe" (Korg 95).
3. Essential images and impressions held loosely with a syntactic framework.
Brown ii.
E. Longer Poems.
1. "The Altarwise by owl-light sequence is an intricately ambiguous, punning fabric in which Thomas carries his linguistic and rhetorical virtuosity to extremes, producing a result both more complex and more obscure than any of the other works" (Korg 100).
