The Process Poetic In Dylan Thomas’ S Poetry

Dylan Thomas,as one of the most important British poets in the 1930 s and1940s,displays fertile imagination and great passion focusing on gothic-grotesque images with a craftsman’s spirit.Process poetic is characteristic of his poetry.Influenced by Western pantheism and modern physical and psychological theories,it combines microscopic organs and macroscopic cosmic images with a focus on ultimates,regarding the universe as absolute flux: time and space,growth and decaying,and life and death are indistinguishable,interdependent and interchangeable.This study aims to explore Thomas’ s philosophy of life,death and process in his poetry from the perspective of process poetic,with its main body explaining the characteristics of language,images and themes in three parts.To begin with,Thomas,as a devious craftsman in words,deploys phonetic rhetorical devices,process vocabulary and refurbished cliches to move his poetry in a predetermined direction.Through the use of various techniques,his poems always present a specific musical rhythm to convey a further thematic meaning in the melody.Process vocabulary often has concrete connotations,and its polysemy deals with the paradoxes of process.Refurbished cliches produce a third meaning by incorporating the implied and the original meanings,renewing our perception of the world via defamiliarization.These virtuoso techniques not only endow his poems with obscurity,alienation and mystery,but also speak of and even embody process linguistically.What’s more,Thomas’ s gothic-grotesque images are manifested in the hybridity,ultimate focus and opposing pairs.The hybridity is created by juxtaposing microscopic organs with macrocosmic celestial bodies,presenting a more universal vision of the human predicament and a sense of the dark humor and grotesquery.Thomas also manages to chart the development of the universe and human beings from their formation to devastation,exploring the existential meaning of the universal entity and the individual.His unique creative method produces multiple opposing pairs,the most common being construction/destruction and harmony/violence.Thomas’ s early poetry focuses on the inextricable tangling and dynamic balance of the images of construction/destruction,while his later poetry conveys a kind of dialectical sublation and development at a higher level through the overwhelming of harmonious images over violent ones.In addition,Thomas regards the universe as absolute flux: it is subject to continuous change,which manifests itself as a force of simultaneous creation and destruction at work in all objects and events.Chronological time is illusory,and dreams and reality are two inseparable facets of the continuum of social reality.The boundaries between nature and the self are blurred,and natural phenomena invade the body and consciousness,thus presenting organic images of individuals in the cycle of life,or finding solace for the soul and returning to humanity via their communion.The fetus dies when it is born into the world,and can push others into the abyss of death,while death is the entrance into another cycle of life decaying.Birth,as the beginning of life,naturally proceeds towards death;while death,as the end of life,leads back to birth.Thus,the two are in an endless cycle.