20th-Century Genius Award Paper - Essay Example

Born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914, Thomas published his first book of poetry in 1934, in which he proved his prowess in the application of poetic diction, imagery, surrealism, and personal fantasy. Critics claim that since he was a hard drinking, unreliable chanter of his own poetry, he usually remained in dispute with the contemporary world. His works, published in his teenage between 1930 and 1934, portray the struggle between crisis of his life, like finding his own identity which is typical of teenage, and himself.

His musical writing style was infatuated with the sound and rhythm of words, and their manifold meanings. The richness of meaning often became illogical, and the innovatory syntax depicting celestial and sexual descriptions made his poetry somewhat hard to understand. The themes of religious uncertainty and the cycle of life and death may have arisen from some catastrophic life events, like the marriage of his love and his relationship with his father. When he travelled to London and Wales between 1934 and 1936, the years of publication of Eighteen Poems and Twenty-five poems respectively, he met a lot of literary personalities and started an affair with the poet and novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson, who later on got married to the novelist C.P. Snow.

This incident made Thomas a heart-broken hard drinker. Thomas had always felt a lot of difficulty in writing first-rate poetry and to be considered as a poet (Poetry Foundation, 2015). This also led him to plagiarize at times. Thomas started bringing elements of sadness, war, and financial failures in his poetry when he moved to a borrowed house in Wales with his wife. When Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937, they were impoverished. They moved to Laugharne, Wales and remained there till Thomas died in 1953.

The monetary troubles that they encountered, like the recurrent borrowing of