Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands district of Swansea, Wales ^[1]. His father, David John Thomas, taught English at Swansea Grammar School and had literary ambitions of his own; his mother, Florence Hannah Williams, came from a farming family in rural Carmarthenshire. Although both parents spoke Welsh, they raised Dylan and his older sister Nancy in English, and the father read Shakespeare aloud to his son from an early age ^[2].

The name Dylan came from the Mabinogion, the medieval collection of Welsh tales, where Dylan ail Don is a figure associated with the sea. The choice was unusual at the time, and the poet later joked about how often it was mispronounced. Marlais honored a great uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet who wrote under the bardic name Gwilym Marles ^[1].

Thomas attended Swansea Grammar School, where his father taught, and by his own account did poorly at everything except English. He began writing poems in school notebooks as a boy, and much of the raw material for his mature work was drafted in these notebooks before he turned twenty ^[2]. Summers spent at Fernhill, a farm near Llangain worked by his aunt Ann Jones, gave him the rural imagery that would later fill poems such as 'Fern Hill' and the elegy 'After the funeral' ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Dylan Thomas usually starts with the astonishing speed of his rise. He left school at sixteen and worked briefly as a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post in Swansea, a job he held for about eighteen months before deciding that journalism did not suit him ^[2]. During this period he kept filling his notebooks with verse, and in 1933 the London press began to take notice. His poem 'And death shall have no dominion' appeared in the New English Weekly that year, and 'Light breaks where no sun shines' was published in The Listener in 1934, attracting letters from established figures including T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender ^[1].

In 1934, still only nineteen, Thomas won a poetry prize sponsored by the Sunday Referee, which carried publication of a book as its award. The result was 18 Poems, released in December 1934, a debut that startled reviewers with its dense sound patterns and bodily, almost biological imagery ^[2]. He moved to London around the same time and quickly became a fixture of the literary pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho.

A second collection, Twenty-five Poems, followed in 1936 and was praised by the influential critic and editor Edith Sitwell, whose public support widened his readership considerably ^[1]. Thomas stood apart from the politically engaged poets of the 1930s such as W. H. Auden. Where they wrote about machines, cities, and ideology, he wrote about birth, death, sex, and the natural world in a style that critics often linked to a romantic revival in British verse ^[4].

Any honest list of Dylan Thomas achievements has to begin with the poems themselves. The Map of Love appeared in 1939, mixing poems and short stories, and Deaths and Entrances in 1946 confirmed his reputation, containing 'Fern Hill', 'Poem in October', and 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London', a response to the wartime bombing raids ^[1]. In 1940 he published Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a collection of largely autobiographical short stories drawing on his Swansea childhood, its title a playful nod to James Joyce ^[2].

Rejected for military service on health grounds, Thomas spent the Second World War writing scripts for documentary and propaganda films with Strand Films in London, work that trained him in writing for the ear and the screen ^[3]. After the war he became a familiar voice on BBC radio, taking part in more than a hundred broadcasts as a reader, essayist, and dramatist. Radio suited him: his rich baritone delivery turned readings of his own poems into performances ^[1].

His best known single poem, the villanelle 'Do not go gentle into that good night', was written in the early 1950s as his father's health failed and was published in the collection In Country Sleep in 1952 ^[4]. That same year his Collected Poems 1934-1952 appeared and won the Foyle poetry prize; the volume sold strongly on both sides of the Atlantic ^[2]. His final major work, the radio drama Under Milk Wood, follows a day in the life of the imaginary Welsh seaside town of Llareggub. Thomas read it publicly in New York in May 1953, and the BBC broadcast a full production in January 1954, two months after his death, with Richard Burton as First Voice ^[5].

In 1936 Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, a dancer of Irish and French descent, in a London pub, reportedly introduced by the painter Augustus John. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on July 11, 1937, despite having almost no money between them ^[1]. The marriage produced three children: Llewelyn, born in 1939, Aeronwy, born in 1943, and Colm, born in 1949. It was a famously turbulent partnership, marked by poverty, heavy drinking on both sides, and mutual infidelities, yet it lasted until the poet's death ^[3].

Money troubles followed Thomas throughout his adult life. He earned respectable sums from broadcasting, film scripts, and reading tours, but debts, unpaid taxes, and an open handed pub life consumed whatever came in. Friends, patrons, and admirers were regularly asked for loans ^[2].

From 1949 the family lived at the Boat House in Laugharne, a small town on the Taf estuary in Carmarthenshire, purchased for them by his patron Margaret Taylor. Thomas worked in a cliffside writing shed above the water, and Laugharne is widely regarded as a chief model for the town in Under Milk Wood ^[5]. The Boat House is now a museum devoted to his life and work ^[6].

Between 1950 and 1953 Thomas made four reading tours of North America, arranged largely by John Malcolm Brinnin, director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The tours were a sensation. He filled halls at universities across the United States and Canada, reading his own poems and those of Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, and others, and he recorded his work for Caedmon Records, sessions that helped launch the spoken word recording industry ^[4].

The tours also accelerated his decline. Accounts from the period describe exhausting travel, relentless social drinking, blackouts, and chest ailments. On his fourth tour, in the autumn of 1953, he was in New York to take part in performances of Under Milk Wood and to discuss an opera project with the composer Igor Stravinsky ^[1].

On November 5, 1953, after days of illness and heavy drinking at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, Thomas collapsed at the Chelsea Hotel and was taken to St Vincent's Hospital in a coma. He died there on November 9, 1953, at the age of thirty nine ^[2]. The medical summary pointed to pneumonia with pressure on the brain and a fatty liver; the popular legend that he drank eighteen straight whiskies before collapsing rests on his own boast and has been questioned by later biographers, who emphasize pneumonia, medical mismanagement, and morphine injections given by a hotel doctor ^[3]. His body was returned to Wales, and he was buried in the churchyard of St Martin's Church, Laugharne, where a plain white cross marks the grave ^[6].

Few modern poets have entered popular culture as deeply as Thomas. 'Do not go gentle into that good night' is quoted at funerals, in films, and in political speeches, and 'And death shall have no dominion' has a similar afterlife. Under Milk Wood has been staged, filmed, and recorded continuously since 1954, including a 1972 film with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter O'Toole ^[5]. The American singer Robert Zimmerman took the stage name Bob Dylan in a nod that he has acknowledged owed something to the Welsh poet ^[4].

In Wales his memory is a civic institution. The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea houses a permanent exhibition, the Boat House and writing shed at Laugharne draw visitors from around the world, and the Swansea Building Society sponsored Dylan Thomas Prize, awarded through Swansea University, honors young English language writers with one of the richer purses in literature ^[6]. In 2014 the centenary of his birth was marked by a year of festivals, broadcasts, and exhibitions across Wales and beyond. A memorial stone to Thomas was unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1982 ^[1].

Critical opinion has always been divided, and any balanced Dylan Thomas biography must say so. Admirers hear in his work a bardic music unmatched in twentieth century English verse; skeptics, including the poet and critic Kingsley Amis, found the rhetoric inflated and the meaning obscure. What is not in dispute is the craftsmanship: surviving worksheets show dozens of drafts for single lines, evidence against the caricature of a careless drunk who wrote by instinct ^[3]. Among plain Dylan Thomas facts, one endures above the legend: he wrote a handful of poems that ordinary readers know by heart, which is the rarest achievement his art allows ^[2].