Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University ofToronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer explains how Thomas "attempts to capture a portrait, in miniature, of the scope of life itself."

There is an overwhelming sense of the emphatic that pervades Dylan Thomas's poetry. There is a feeling of passionate insistence that results from his use of an elliptical syntax, where nouns and their accompanying adjectives work against the preconceived notions of phraseology not only to express but to plead for their subject matter. He rarely addresses his subject matter frontally; instead he talks around his issues and concerns by inverting the expected relationships between nouns and adjectives and by describing the energy and the processes behind an idea rather than just the elements that comprise the...