Dylan Thomas' 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems: A Linguistic and Literary Analysis

This thesis is focused on the analysis of the theme of Creation in Dylan Thomas’ first two poetic collections, 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems. Since the way in which a poet conveys particular themes is strictly connected with the usage he or she makes of language, my study relied strongly on a systematic and digital linguistic analysis of the poems included in the collections. I derived my means and tools from the discipline of Corpus Stylistics, which consists in “the study of literary texts that employs corpus-linguistic methods to support the analysis of textual meanings and the interpretation of texts” (Mahlberg 2015). Performing a corpus stylistic analysis involves the investigation of literary texts in digitalized format with the help of specific concordancing software for automated text analysis. In this case, I decided to use two kinds of software, namely Wmatrix (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/Wmatrix3.html) and AntConc (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/), to obtain lists of frequent and key semantic domains, frequency lists for single words and to analyze collocational patterns of lexical items (chapters 1, 2 and 3). The idea of frequency was a leading one in my research: the higher the frequency, the higher the importance of a phenomenon. The study of frequency was therefore necessary to test whether a particular theme was highly represented linguistically (chapter 4), whereas its derived concept of keyness, i.e. the statistical significance of frequency when comparing two texts, allowed me to analyze semantic domains which were unusually frequent in 18 and Twenty-five Poems when compared to Thomas’ remaining three collections (chapter 5). In both cases, linguistic investigation was carried out looking at words in their context, by reading concordance lines for collocates and colligates, semantic preferences and semantic prosodies. One of the most interesting results of the linguistic analysis was the prominence of words belonging to the Anatomy and physiology domain in the early works, and the semantic prosody displayed by the word blood, the most frequent item of this domain; other domains which proved significant for my analysis were Living creatures, Dead and Existing. The key semantic domains identified by comparing 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems with the later collections highlighted more significant items construing the semantics of People: Male, In power, Time and Linguistic Actions, States and Processes. From the analysis carried out on these items it emerged quite clearly how males are often portrayed as creators-destroyers. Figures belonging to In power are almost always males and display a similar connotation. Findings resulting from the analysis of Time show an attitude of mistrust and fear towards the future; moreover, the close study of the semantic domain Time: Future shed some light on the use Thomas makes of the modal shall. The presence of items belonging to the field of Linguistic Actions, States and Processes was particularly significant for their direct connection to the concept of poetic Creation and some (e.g. words) displayed an ambiguous semantic prosody in line with the other findings of this thesis.The very last part of the thesis (chapter 6) contains a literary interpretation of the findings of the previous chapters. The first part concerns the relationship between Thomas and literary tradition. In the second part, a brief investigation carried out on early short stories has shown the pervasiveness of the theme of Creation in Thomas’ production. In conclusion, my research highlighted how the theme of Creation is peculiar to the early works of Dylan Thomas. The pervasiveness of this theme is mirrored by linguistic choices emerging from the analysis of both frequent and key semantic domains. Linguistic findings are supported by existing literary criticism, but they also add to it in terms of insight and accuracy of analysis, at times challenging previous assumptions.