Dylan Thomas: The wise and Wanton Poet

.Dylan Thomas: The Wise and Wanton Poet

Dylan Thomas, Wales’ most distinguished poet, was a consummate poet of the modernist movement in literature and poet who influenced such contemporary music luminaries as Bob Dylan and The Beatles, Bob Dylan even changed his last name from Zimmerman to Dylan and The Beatles included his image on an album cover.
However, Dylan himself was quite the luminary in the modernist movement, a movement in poetry characterized by freedom of form and poetic license. And unlike traditional forms of verse in which the poets adhere to various forms, as dictated by literary rules, modernist poetry does not have to have set of predetermined meter and rhyme but can be written in free verse, rhyme or blank verse or a combination of all the forms and does not necessarily have to make logical sense to the reader. Thus the reader can feel it and experience it and bring to the poem his own experiences and his own personal of the poem. So in modernist poetry, both freedom of expression and interpretation is the name of the game.
Dylan’s most famous poem is “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” was written at a time when Dylan’s beloved father was on his deathbed as a heartfelt response to his grief and his anger that death cuts us off leaving many good things that life has to offer unrealized and inexperienced. And the poem was a call to all sorts of men to live life to the fullest and to proactively resist the limitations of aging the finality of death. In short, Dylan saw death as the great enemy of man. And this masterpiece of a poem is one of my own personal favorites.