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On November 9, 1953, Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, died at the age of 39. From the article:
"Born in Swansea, Wales, Dylan Thomas is famous for his acutely lyrical and emotional poetry, as well as his turbulent personal life. The originality of his work makes categorization difficult. In his life he avoided becoming involved with literary groups or movements, and unlike other prominent writers of the 1930s—such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for example—he had little use for socialistic ideas in his art. Thomas can be seen as an extension into the 20th century of the general movement called Romanticism, particularly in its emphasis on imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form. Considered to be one of the greatest Welsh poets of all time, Thomas is largely known for his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery in his poems.
Thomas began writing poetry as a child, and was publishing by his teens. His notebooks from 1930 and 1934, when he was 16 to 20 years old, reveal the young poet’s struggle with a number of personal crises. In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg described them as “related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one’s identity.” Revised versions of some of the notebooks’ poems became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems. Published in December 1934, it received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably.
Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words—with their sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings. This richness of meaning, an often illogical and revolutionary syntax, and catalogues of cosmic and sexual imagery render Thomas’s early poetry original and difficult. In a letter to Richard Church, Thomas commented on what he considered some of his own excesses: “Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence.” Similarly, in a letter to Glyn Jones, he wrote: “My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.”
The Eighteen Poems reveal some of Thomas’s key themes, which he was to return to later in his career: the unity of time, the similarity between creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living things. This last theme was identified by Elder Olson in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas as part of the tradition of the microcosm-macrocosm: “He analogizes the anatomy of man to the structure of the universe … and sees the human microcosm as an image of the macrocosm, and conversely.”
During the almost two years between the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934 and Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Thomas moved back and forth between London and Wales a great deal. In London he met influential people in the literary world, including Vernon Watkins, an older man whose sedate lifestyle contrasted markedly with Thomas’s. Watkins became a frequent source of money for the continually destitute Thomas. During this period Thomas’s drinking became a serious problem, and his friends would sometimes take him off to out-of-the-way places in Cornwall and Ireland to remove him from temptation with the hope that he would do more writing.
Thomas’s second volume of poetry, Twenty-five Poems, was published in September 1936. Most of the poems were revised from the notebooks; Constantine FitzGibbon reported in The Life of Dylan Thomas that “only six entirely new poems, that is to say poems written in the year and a half between the publication of [Eighteen Poems] and the despatch of the second volume to the printers, are to be found in that volume.” In his Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris noted that “the reviews were generally favourable, but with one exception they were not as enthusiastic as they were for [Eighteen Poems].” This exception, however, almost assured the volume’s commercial success; it was a laudatory review by Dame Edith Sitwell in the Sunday Times. As cited by Ferris, the review proclaimed: “The work of this very young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally. … I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement.”
The volume includes a significant sonnet sequence of 10 poems, “Altarwise by owl-light,” written in Ireland the year before publication. In these sonnets Thomas moved from the pre-Christian primitivism of most of the Eighteen Poems to a Christian mythology based upon love. While much of the attention given to Twenty-five Poems has been focused on the religious sonnets, the volume as a whole contains indications of a shift in emphasis in Thomas’s writing. Richard Morton noted in An Outline of the Works of Dylan Thomas that the poems of this volume are “concerned with the relationship between the poet and his environment,” particularly the natural environment. “In Twenty-five Poems, we can see the beginnings of the pastoral mode which reaches its fulfillment in the great lyrics of Thomas’s last poems.” And, as Korg said, “at least three of the poems in the second volume are about the poet’s reactions to other people, themes of an entirely different class from those of [Eighteen Poems]; and these three anticipate [Thomas’s] turning outward in his later poems toward such subjects as his aunt’s funeral, the landscape, and his relations with his wife and children.”
Some of the best poems in the book are rather straightforward pieces—”This bread break,” “The hand that signed the paper,” “And death shall have no dominion”—but others, such as “I, in my intricate image,” are as involved and abstruse as the poems of the earlier volume. Derek Stanford noted that still “there are traces of doubt, questioning, and despair in many of these pieces.” Thomas, however, chose to place the optimistic “And death shall have no dominion” at the end of the volume. This poem has always been one of Thomas’s most popular works, perhaps because, as Clark Emery noted, it was “published in a time when notes of affirmation—philosophical, political, or otherwise—did not resound among intelligent liberal humanists, [and thus] it answered an emotional need. … It affirmed without sentimentalizing; it expressed a faith without theologizing.”
The “Altarwise by owl-light” poems as well as “And death shall have no dominion” raise questions concerning the extent to which Dylan Thomas can be called a religious writer. In an essay for A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, W.S. Merwin was one of the first to deal with this issue; he found Thomas to be a religious writer because he was a “celebrator in the ritual sense: a maker and performer of a rite … . That which he celebrates is creation, and more particularly the human condition.” However, the positions on this issue can be—and have been—as various as the definitions of what constitutes a religious outlook. At one end of the scale, critics do not dispute that Thomas used religious imagery in his poetry; at the other end, critics generally agree that, at least during certain periods of his creative life, Thomas’s vision was not that of any orthodox religious system. The range of interpretations was summarized by R.B. Kershner Jr., in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics: “He has been called a pagan, a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love, Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself.”
On July 11, 1937, Thomas married dancer Caitlin Macnamara; they were penniless and lacked the blessings of their parents. After spending some time with each of their reluctant families, they moved to a borrowed house in Laugharne, Wales. This fishing village became their permanent address, though they lived in many temporary dwellings in England and Wales through the war years and after, until Thomas’s death in 1953. The borrowing of houses and money became recurring events in their married life together. Korg associated these external circumstances in the poet’s life with his artistic development: “Thomas’s time of settling in Laugharne coincides roughly with the period when his poetry began to turn outward; his love for Caitlin, the birth of his first child, Llewellyn, responses to the Welsh countryside and its people, and ultimately events of the war began to enter his poetry as visible subjects.”
Thomas’s third book, The Map of Love, appeared in August 1939, a month before war officially broke out in Europe. It comprised a strange union of 16 poems and seven stories, the stories having been previously published in periodicals. The volume was a commercial failure, perhaps because of the war. Ferris reported that “the book was respectfully and sometimes warmly reviewed, with a few dissenters”; yet these works of Thomas’s middle period were his least successful.
In sharp contrast to the stories in The Map of Love are those published the following year, 1940, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas claimed in a letter to Vernon Watkins that he “kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons.” These Thomas stories are different from the earlier ones in their particularity of character and place, their straightforward plot lines, and their relevance to Thomas’s childhood in Wales. Thomas wrote to Watkins in August 1939: “I’ve been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas.” Reviews of the book were mixed, and it didn’t sell well at the time, though it later became enormously popular.
Thomas avoided service in World War II because of medical problems; he had also considered filing for conscientious objector status. He was able to secure employment during the war years writing documentary scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While he considered it hack work, it provided the first regular income since his newspaper days and also allowed him to spend a good deal of time in London pubs. This pragmatic writing was the beginning of a career that Thomas pursued until his death; it did not, however, replace what he considered his more important work, the writing of poems. In addition to the documentaries, he wrote radio scripts and eventually screenplays for feature films. Though his income from these activities was moderate, it did not allow him relief from debt or borrowing.
In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published. It is essentially the time-honored story of a country boy in the big city. Annis Pratt commented that Thomas intended the story to be “a series of ‘adventures’ in which the hero’s ‘skins’ would be stripped off one by one like a snake’s until he was left in a kind of quintessential nakedness to face the world.”
Thomas’s work next saw publication in a 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “The Hunchback in the Park,” and “Fern Hill.” Deaths and Entrances was an instant success. Ferris noted that 3000 sold in the first month after its publication and that the publisher, Dent, ordered a reprint of the same number.
H. Jones, in his Dylan Thomas, declared the volume to be the core of Thomas’s achievement. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, while still provoking arguments about interpretation, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like “Fern Hill,” illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. As Jacob Korg said of these poems, “the figures and landscapes have a new solidity, a new self-sufficiency, and the dialectic vision no longer penetrates them as though they were no more than windows opening on a timeless universe.”
While these later poems in Deaths and Entrances are less compressed than the earlier ones, they reveal no less verbal facility or less concern for what is generally called poetic style. Thomas was always a highly individual stylist. Sound was as important as sense in his poems—some would even say more important. He made ample use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and approximate rhyme. In The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, William T. Moynihan describes his rhythm as “accentual syllabic”: “its stress pattern generally sounds as though it is iambic, but this very justifiable assumption cannot always be borne out by traditional scansion. Thomas may, in fact, have depended upon an iambic expectancy, as he varied his rhythms beyond any customary iambic formulation and then—by completely unprecedented innovations—created his own rhythm, which is very close to iambic.”
By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Kershner asserted that Thomas “became the wild man from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure with racial access to roots of experience which more civilized Londoners lacked.” His drinking, his democratic tendencies, and the frank sexual imagery of his poetry made him the focal point of an ill-defined artistic rebellion.
In 1949 Thomas and his family moved to the Boat House of Laugharne, Wales, a house provided for them by one of Thomas’s benefactors, Margaret Taylor. For the last four years of his life he moved between this dwelling and the United States, where he went on four separate tours to read his poetry and receive the adulation of the American public. The often-sordid accounts of these tours are provided in John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America. Thomas’s last separate volume of poetry before the Collected Poems, 1934-1952 was Country Sleep, published by New Directions in the United States in 1952. As originally published, this book contained six of the poet’s most accomplished works: “Over Sir John’s Hill,” “Poem on his Birthday,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “Lament,” “In the white giant’s thigh,” and “In country sleep.” Concerning this volume, Rushworth M. Kidder commented in Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit that “the fact of physical death seems to present itself to the poet as something more than distant event. … These poems come to terms with death through a form of worship: not propitiatory worship of Death as deity, but worship of a higher Deity by whose power all things, including death, are controlled.”
Several of Thomas’s film scripts have been published, including The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesa. Neither of these was produced, but they gave Thomas the opportunity to develop his dramatic skills. These skills culminated in his radio play, Under Milk Wood, written over a long period of time and frantically revised in America during the last months of his life. The play grew out of the story “Quite Early One Morning,” which was broadcast by the BBC in 1945. Under Milk Wood is set in a small Welsh town called Llareggub and covers one day in the lives of its provincial characters. Raymond Williams, in an essay for Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, said that Under Milk Wood is “the retained extravagance of an adolescent’s imaginings. Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is not the least of its dramatic virtues.” Thomas read the play as a solo performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953; the first group reading was on May 14. The following November, Dylan Thomas died in New York of ailments complicated by alcohol and drug abuse."
"Born in Swansea, Wales, Dylan Thomas is famous for his acutely lyrical and emotional poetry, as well as his turbulent personal life. The originality of his work makes categorization difficult. In his life he avoided becoming involved with literary groups or movements, and unlike other prominent writers of the 1930s—such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for example—he had little use for socialistic ideas in his art. Thomas can be seen as an extension into the 20th century of the general movement called Romanticism, particularly in its emphasis on imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form. Considered to be one of the greatest Welsh poets of all time, Thomas is largely known for his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery in his poems.
Thomas began writing poetry as a child, and was publishing by his teens. His notebooks from 1930 and 1934, when he was 16 to 20 years old, reveal the young poet’s struggle with a number of personal crises. In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg described them as “related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one’s identity.” Revised versions of some of the notebooks’ poems became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems. Published in December 1934, it received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably.
Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words—with their sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings. This richness of meaning, an often illogical and revolutionary syntax, and catalogues of cosmic and sexual imagery render Thomas’s early poetry original and difficult. In a letter to Richard Church, Thomas commented on what he considered some of his own excesses: “Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence.” Similarly, in a letter to Glyn Jones, he wrote: “My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.”
The Eighteen Poems reveal some of Thomas’s key themes, which he was to return to later in his career: the unity of time, the similarity between creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living things. This last theme was identified by Elder Olson in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas as part of the tradition of the microcosm-macrocosm: “He analogizes the anatomy of man to the structure of the universe … and sees the human microcosm as an image of the macrocosm, and conversely.”
During the almost two years between the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934 and Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Thomas moved back and forth between London and Wales a great deal. In London he met influential people in the literary world, including Vernon Watkins, an older man whose sedate lifestyle contrasted markedly with Thomas’s. Watkins became a frequent source of money for the continually destitute Thomas. During this period Thomas’s drinking became a serious problem, and his friends would sometimes take him off to out-of-the-way places in Cornwall and Ireland to remove him from temptation with the hope that he would do more writing.
Thomas’s second volume of poetry, Twenty-five Poems, was published in September 1936. Most of the poems were revised from the notebooks; Constantine FitzGibbon reported in The Life of Dylan Thomas that “only six entirely new poems, that is to say poems written in the year and a half between the publication of [Eighteen Poems] and the despatch of the second volume to the printers, are to be found in that volume.” In his Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris noted that “the reviews were generally favourable, but with one exception they were not as enthusiastic as they were for [Eighteen Poems].” This exception, however, almost assured the volume’s commercial success; it was a laudatory review by Dame Edith Sitwell in the Sunday Times. As cited by Ferris, the review proclaimed: “The work of this very young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally. … I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement.”
The volume includes a significant sonnet sequence of 10 poems, “Altarwise by owl-light,” written in Ireland the year before publication. In these sonnets Thomas moved from the pre-Christian primitivism of most of the Eighteen Poems to a Christian mythology based upon love. While much of the attention given to Twenty-five Poems has been focused on the religious sonnets, the volume as a whole contains indications of a shift in emphasis in Thomas’s writing. Richard Morton noted in An Outline of the Works of Dylan Thomas that the poems of this volume are “concerned with the relationship between the poet and his environment,” particularly the natural environment. “In Twenty-five Poems, we can see the beginnings of the pastoral mode which reaches its fulfillment in the great lyrics of Thomas’s last poems.” And, as Korg said, “at least three of the poems in the second volume are about the poet’s reactions to other people, themes of an entirely different class from those of [Eighteen Poems]; and these three anticipate [Thomas’s] turning outward in his later poems toward such subjects as his aunt’s funeral, the landscape, and his relations with his wife and children.”
Some of the best poems in the book are rather straightforward pieces—”This bread break,” “The hand that signed the paper,” “And death shall have no dominion”—but others, such as “I, in my intricate image,” are as involved and abstruse as the poems of the earlier volume. Derek Stanford noted that still “there are traces of doubt, questioning, and despair in many of these pieces.” Thomas, however, chose to place the optimistic “And death shall have no dominion” at the end of the volume. This poem has always been one of Thomas’s most popular works, perhaps because, as Clark Emery noted, it was “published in a time when notes of affirmation—philosophical, political, or otherwise—did not resound among intelligent liberal humanists, [and thus] it answered an emotional need. … It affirmed without sentimentalizing; it expressed a faith without theologizing.”
The “Altarwise by owl-light” poems as well as “And death shall have no dominion” raise questions concerning the extent to which Dylan Thomas can be called a religious writer. In an essay for A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, W.S. Merwin was one of the first to deal with this issue; he found Thomas to be a religious writer because he was a “celebrator in the ritual sense: a maker and performer of a rite … . That which he celebrates is creation, and more particularly the human condition.” However, the positions on this issue can be—and have been—as various as the definitions of what constitutes a religious outlook. At one end of the scale, critics do not dispute that Thomas used religious imagery in his poetry; at the other end, critics generally agree that, at least during certain periods of his creative life, Thomas’s vision was not that of any orthodox religious system. The range of interpretations was summarized by R.B. Kershner Jr., in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics: “He has been called a pagan, a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love, Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself.”
On July 11, 1937, Thomas married dancer Caitlin Macnamara; they were penniless and lacked the blessings of their parents. After spending some time with each of their reluctant families, they moved to a borrowed house in Laugharne, Wales. This fishing village became their permanent address, though they lived in many temporary dwellings in England and Wales through the war years and after, until Thomas’s death in 1953. The borrowing of houses and money became recurring events in their married life together. Korg associated these external circumstances in the poet’s life with his artistic development: “Thomas’s time of settling in Laugharne coincides roughly with the period when his poetry began to turn outward; his love for Caitlin, the birth of his first child, Llewellyn, responses to the Welsh countryside and its people, and ultimately events of the war began to enter his poetry as visible subjects.”
Thomas’s third book, The Map of Love, appeared in August 1939, a month before war officially broke out in Europe. It comprised a strange union of 16 poems and seven stories, the stories having been previously published in periodicals. The volume was a commercial failure, perhaps because of the war. Ferris reported that “the book was respectfully and sometimes warmly reviewed, with a few dissenters”; yet these works of Thomas’s middle period were his least successful.
In sharp contrast to the stories in The Map of Love are those published the following year, 1940, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas claimed in a letter to Vernon Watkins that he “kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons.” These Thomas stories are different from the earlier ones in their particularity of character and place, their straightforward plot lines, and their relevance to Thomas’s childhood in Wales. Thomas wrote to Watkins in August 1939: “I’ve been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas.” Reviews of the book were mixed, and it didn’t sell well at the time, though it later became enormously popular.
Thomas avoided service in World War II because of medical problems; he had also considered filing for conscientious objector status. He was able to secure employment during the war years writing documentary scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While he considered it hack work, it provided the first regular income since his newspaper days and also allowed him to spend a good deal of time in London pubs. This pragmatic writing was the beginning of a career that Thomas pursued until his death; it did not, however, replace what he considered his more important work, the writing of poems. In addition to the documentaries, he wrote radio scripts and eventually screenplays for feature films. Though his income from these activities was moderate, it did not allow him relief from debt or borrowing.
In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published. It is essentially the time-honored story of a country boy in the big city. Annis Pratt commented that Thomas intended the story to be “a series of ‘adventures’ in which the hero’s ‘skins’ would be stripped off one by one like a snake’s until he was left in a kind of quintessential nakedness to face the world.”
Thomas’s work next saw publication in a 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “The Hunchback in the Park,” and “Fern Hill.” Deaths and Entrances was an instant success. Ferris noted that 3000 sold in the first month after its publication and that the publisher, Dent, ordered a reprint of the same number.
H. Jones, in his Dylan Thomas, declared the volume to be the core of Thomas’s achievement. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, while still provoking arguments about interpretation, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like “Fern Hill,” illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. As Jacob Korg said of these poems, “the figures and landscapes have a new solidity, a new self-sufficiency, and the dialectic vision no longer penetrates them as though they were no more than windows opening on a timeless universe.”
While these later poems in Deaths and Entrances are less compressed than the earlier ones, they reveal no less verbal facility or less concern for what is generally called poetic style. Thomas was always a highly individual stylist. Sound was as important as sense in his poems—some would even say more important. He made ample use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and approximate rhyme. In The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, William T. Moynihan describes his rhythm as “accentual syllabic”: “its stress pattern generally sounds as though it is iambic, but this very justifiable assumption cannot always be borne out by traditional scansion. Thomas may, in fact, have depended upon an iambic expectancy, as he varied his rhythms beyond any customary iambic formulation and then—by completely unprecedented innovations—created his own rhythm, which is very close to iambic.”
By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Kershner asserted that Thomas “became the wild man from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure with racial access to roots of experience which more civilized Londoners lacked.” His drinking, his democratic tendencies, and the frank sexual imagery of his poetry made him the focal point of an ill-defined artistic rebellion.
In 1949 Thomas and his family moved to the Boat House of Laugharne, Wales, a house provided for them by one of Thomas’s benefactors, Margaret Taylor. For the last four years of his life he moved between this dwelling and the United States, where he went on four separate tours to read his poetry and receive the adulation of the American public. The often-sordid accounts of these tours are provided in John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America. Thomas’s last separate volume of poetry before the Collected Poems, 1934-1952 was Country Sleep, published by New Directions in the United States in 1952. As originally published, this book contained six of the poet’s most accomplished works: “Over Sir John’s Hill,” “Poem on his Birthday,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “Lament,” “In the white giant’s thigh,” and “In country sleep.” Concerning this volume, Rushworth M. Kidder commented in Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit that “the fact of physical death seems to present itself to the poet as something more than distant event. … These poems come to terms with death through a form of worship: not propitiatory worship of Death as deity, but worship of a higher Deity by whose power all things, including death, are controlled.”
Several of Thomas’s film scripts have been published, including The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesa. Neither of these was produced, but they gave Thomas the opportunity to develop his dramatic skills. These skills culminated in his radio play, Under Milk Wood, written over a long period of time and frantically revised in America during the last months of his life. The play grew out of the story “Quite Early One Morning,” which was broadcast by the BBC in 1945. Under Milk Wood is set in a small Welsh town called Llareggub and covers one day in the lives of its provincial characters. Raymond Williams, in an essay for Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, said that Under Milk Wood is “the retained extravagance of an adolescent’s imaginings. Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is not the least of its dramatic virtues.” Thomas read the play as a solo performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953; the first group reading was on May 14. The following November, Dylan Thomas died in New York of ailments complicated by alcohol and drug abuse."
Dylan Thomas | Poetry Foundation
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SGT (Join to see)
Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen His poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle. It is not an easy poem to compose. https://poets.org/glossary/villanelle
Villanelle | Academy of American Poets
Villanelle - The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains....
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Dylan on Dylan (Dylan Thomas documentary)
Dylan Thomas documentary.
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on November 9, 1953 Welsh poet, who is famous for his acutely lyrical and emotional poetry Dylan Thomas died at the age of 39.
Dylan on Dylan (Dylan Thomas documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDAXkhTwTFM
Images:
1. Dylan Thomas in Wales laying across a path
2. Dylan and Caitlin Thomas
3. Dylan Thomas 'Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion'
4. Cliff-top writing shed overlooking Afon Taf, near Boat House, Laugharne, used by Dylan Thomas
Biographies
1. poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas
2. historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Life-of-Dylan-Thomas/ /
1. Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas/]}
Dylan Thomas
1914–1953
read this poet's poems
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.
In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books.
Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."
Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937.
About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality."
In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems.
Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).
In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters," and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).
In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.
Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.
________________________________________
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Poems (1971)
Collected Poems (1952)
In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (1952)
Deaths and Entrances (1946)
New Poems (1943)
The Map of Love (1939)
The World I Breath (1939)
Twenty-Five Poems (1936)
18 Poems (The Fortune press, 1934)
Prose
Early Prose Writings (1971)
Collected Prose (1969)
The Beach of Falesá (1964)
Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957)
Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (1955)
A Prospect of the Sea (1955)
A Child's Christmas in Wales (1954)
Quite Early One Morning (1954)
The Doctor and the Devils (1953)
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)
Notebooks (1934)
Drama
Under Milk Wood (1954)"
2. Background from {[https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Life-of-Dylan-Thomas/ /]}
The Life of Dylan Thomas by Ben Johnson
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in the Uplands suburb of Swansea, South Wales on 27 October 1914 to David John (‘DJ’) Thomas, Senior English master at Swansea Grammar School, and his wife Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) a seamstress, the second of two children and younger brother to Nancy Marles Thomas, nine years his senior.
Dylan’s middle name, Marlais ( pronounced ‘Mar-lice’) was chosen in honour of his great-uncle, the Unitarian Minister and poet William Thomas, better know by his pseudonym or ‘bardic name’ Gwilym Marles. A combination of the words ‘mawr’ meaning big and either ‘clais’ or ‘glas’ meaning ditch, stream or blue, the name is distinctly Welsh in origin. While the name Dylan is also a strong Welsh name pronounced “Dullan”, interestingly, Dylan himself preferred to use the English pronunciation “Dillan” and during radio broadcasts was often know to correct announcers using the Welsh pronunciation.
Indeed, whilst Thomas is arguably the most well known Welsh poet of all time, paradoxically his literary work is written entirely in English. DJ and Florence were both fluent Welsh speakers (and DJ even provided extracurricular Welsh lessons from their home) but following the tradition of the time, Nancy and Dylan were not brought up to be bilingual.
It was this decline of the Welsh Language during the nineteenth century that subsequently gave rise to the ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’ or as many English speaking Welsh men and women preferred, ‘Welsh writing in English’.
There was an even greater upsurge in Welsh literature written in the English language during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the UK, heavy industry was one of the worst hit areas, and the experiences of those dependent on the Welsh coalfields inspired a plethora of writing from the many writers belonging to this Anglo-Welsh school, who were routed deeply in the working class families of South Wales and wished to share their experiences with the world outside Wales. In contrast though, Thomas hailed from a fairly middle-class background and had grown up with more rural experiences. He often holidayed in Carmarthenshire, and his home in Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
Many of Dylan’s poems drew from these childhood experiences of the rural Welsh countryside and he began writing of them in his notebooks at the age of 15 whilst attending Swansea Grammar School. Indeed his first and second collections of poems, entitled ’18 poems’ and ’25 poems’ respectively, drew heavily from these notebooks. Nearly two thirds of Dylan’s poetic works were written whilst he was still a teenager.
Following a short-lived position as a junior reporter at the South Wales Daily Post at the age of 16, Dylan left the newspaper to concentrate on his poetry, working as a freelance journalist when the need arose. Having joined the Swansea Little Theatre Company, of which his sister Nancy was also a member, Dylan began to frequent the pubs and café scene in Swansea with his artistic cotemporaries. As a group they became known as the The Kardomah Gang, in honour of one of their favourite local haunt, the Kardomah Café. The café was originally located in Swansea’s Castle Street, coincidentally on the site of the former Congregational Chapel where Dylan’s parents were married in 1903.
This was a time of great productivity for Dylan’s poetry. At the age of 18 the first of his poems to be published outside of Wales, ‘And Death Shall have No Dominion’, was published in the New England Weekly. Like many Anglo-Welsh writers of the day, Thomas moved to London in his pursuit of literary success, and with the publication of ’18 Poems’ in December 1934, he began to attract attention from big hitters in the London poetry world such as T.S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell.
Having met Caitlin Macnamara in 1936 in the Wheatsheaf Pub in London’s West End, they embarked on a passionate affair culminating in their marriage on 11 July 1937 in Mousehole, Cornwall, against the wishes of Dylan’s parents. Their nomadic lifestyle saw them move from London to Wales, then to Oxford, and following a brief sojourn to Ireland and Italy, they eventually settled in the small Welsh coastal town of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire during the spring of 1938. The couple had three children, Llewelyn Edouard (1939-2000), Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis (1943-2009) and Colm Garan Hart (born 1949).
The couple’s tumultuous relationship is well documented, not least in Caitlin’s own memoirs of their married life, entitled ‘Leftover Life to Kill’ and ‘Double Drink story‘ (published posthumously), which describe the couple’s fiery partnership, exacerbated by mutual infidelities and a fondness for alcohol. Dylan himself referred to their union as “raw, red bleeding meat”. However, the couple remained together until Dylan’s death in 1953. And whilst Caitlin eventually remarried and relocated to Italy, following her own death in 1994 she was buried with Dylan in Laugharne.
Much of Dylan’s popularity both at home and abroad stemmed from his descriptive lyrical prose and his ability to depict a Wales few Welsh people in the industrial age ever got to see. Nevertheless, he portrayed an image of ‘Welshness’ that was held dear to the hearts of many Welsh men and women. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dylan’s poetry did not focus on the bleak images of the industrial depression. Where he does refer to industrial terminology, such as in the poem’ All All And All’, he combines it with the beauty of nature.
Through the character Rev Eli Jenkins in one of his best-known works, the ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood (which was later made famous by another equally iconic Welshman, Richard Burton) Dylan taps into that collective ‘Welshness’ to which many are so fiercely loyal: “I know there are Towns lovelier than ours, And fairer hills and loftier far…But let me choose and oh! I should Love all my life and longer To stroll among our trees and stray In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down, And hear the Dewi sing all day, And never, never leave the town.”
It was at the beginning of the Second World War, when Thomas’ ill health (he had suffered from bronchitis and asthma since childhood) prevented him from being called up, that he moved into script-writing, scripting films for the Ministry of Information. The scripts he produced for film and radio were often performed by Dylan himself, and his resonant voice and ability to capture a multitude of accents and expressions only served to increase his popularity throughout the world, particularly in America, where his subtle Welsh tones became nearly as famous as his poetry and plays themselves.
However, as his popularity rose it was also during this time that Thomas gained a reputation as a heavy drinker. Having been drawn to the tragic romance of poets like Byron and Keats, both Dylan and Caitlyn indulged in a hedonistic lifestyle of which alcohol was the epicentre.
Whilst in New York to promote ‘Under Milk Wood‘ in the winter of 1953, Dylan was taken ill and had to cancel several engagements. Despite being visited by his physician, Dr. Feltenstein, on numerous occasions his condition deteriorated and morphine injections administered in error by the Doctor left him struggling to breathe. By the time he was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent’s Hospital he had turned blue and slipped into a coma. Doctors diagnosed a severe case of bronchitis and an x-ray confirmed that Dylan was also suffering from pneumonia. The infection worsened and on 9 November Dylan died, never having regained consciousness.
Immediately after his death and in the years that followed, Dylan’s lifestyle prompted speculation that he had actually drunk himself to death. The image of the rebellious free-living artist who feel victim to his own excesses was infinitely more dramatic than the reality. Despite his heavy drinking his post mortem showed very little sign of the cirrhosis associated with alcohol-related deaths.
While there are times when the often embellished tales of Dylan’s tempestuous relationship with both Caitlin and alcohol have threatened to overshadow the achievements of his literary work, today it is an indisputable fact that Dylan has gone into history as one of Wales’ most celebrated sons.
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury MSgt Paul Connors
Dylan on Dylan (Dylan Thomas documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDAXkhTwTFM
Images:
1. Dylan Thomas in Wales laying across a path
2. Dylan and Caitlin Thomas
3. Dylan Thomas 'Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion'
4. Cliff-top writing shed overlooking Afon Taf, near Boat House, Laugharne, used by Dylan Thomas
Biographies
1. poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas
2. historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Life-of-Dylan-Thomas/ /
1. Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas/]}
Dylan Thomas
1914–1953
read this poet's poems
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.
In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books.
Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."
Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937.
About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality."
In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems.
Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).
In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters," and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).
In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.
Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.
________________________________________
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Poems (1971)
Collected Poems (1952)
In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (1952)
Deaths and Entrances (1946)
New Poems (1943)
The Map of Love (1939)
The World I Breath (1939)
Twenty-Five Poems (1936)
18 Poems (The Fortune press, 1934)
Prose
Early Prose Writings (1971)
Collected Prose (1969)
The Beach of Falesá (1964)
Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957)
Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (1955)
A Prospect of the Sea (1955)
A Child's Christmas in Wales (1954)
Quite Early One Morning (1954)
The Doctor and the Devils (1953)
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)
Notebooks (1934)
Drama
Under Milk Wood (1954)"
2. Background from {[https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Life-of-Dylan-Thomas/ /]}
The Life of Dylan Thomas by Ben Johnson
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in the Uplands suburb of Swansea, South Wales on 27 October 1914 to David John (‘DJ’) Thomas, Senior English master at Swansea Grammar School, and his wife Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) a seamstress, the second of two children and younger brother to Nancy Marles Thomas, nine years his senior.
Dylan’s middle name, Marlais ( pronounced ‘Mar-lice’) was chosen in honour of his great-uncle, the Unitarian Minister and poet William Thomas, better know by his pseudonym or ‘bardic name’ Gwilym Marles. A combination of the words ‘mawr’ meaning big and either ‘clais’ or ‘glas’ meaning ditch, stream or blue, the name is distinctly Welsh in origin. While the name Dylan is also a strong Welsh name pronounced “Dullan”, interestingly, Dylan himself preferred to use the English pronunciation “Dillan” and during radio broadcasts was often know to correct announcers using the Welsh pronunciation.
Indeed, whilst Thomas is arguably the most well known Welsh poet of all time, paradoxically his literary work is written entirely in English. DJ and Florence were both fluent Welsh speakers (and DJ even provided extracurricular Welsh lessons from their home) but following the tradition of the time, Nancy and Dylan were not brought up to be bilingual.
It was this decline of the Welsh Language during the nineteenth century that subsequently gave rise to the ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’ or as many English speaking Welsh men and women preferred, ‘Welsh writing in English’.
There was an even greater upsurge in Welsh literature written in the English language during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the UK, heavy industry was one of the worst hit areas, and the experiences of those dependent on the Welsh coalfields inspired a plethora of writing from the many writers belonging to this Anglo-Welsh school, who were routed deeply in the working class families of South Wales and wished to share their experiences with the world outside Wales. In contrast though, Thomas hailed from a fairly middle-class background and had grown up with more rural experiences. He often holidayed in Carmarthenshire, and his home in Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
Many of Dylan’s poems drew from these childhood experiences of the rural Welsh countryside and he began writing of them in his notebooks at the age of 15 whilst attending Swansea Grammar School. Indeed his first and second collections of poems, entitled ’18 poems’ and ’25 poems’ respectively, drew heavily from these notebooks. Nearly two thirds of Dylan’s poetic works were written whilst he was still a teenager.
Following a short-lived position as a junior reporter at the South Wales Daily Post at the age of 16, Dylan left the newspaper to concentrate on his poetry, working as a freelance journalist when the need arose. Having joined the Swansea Little Theatre Company, of which his sister Nancy was also a member, Dylan began to frequent the pubs and café scene in Swansea with his artistic cotemporaries. As a group they became known as the The Kardomah Gang, in honour of one of their favourite local haunt, the Kardomah Café. The café was originally located in Swansea’s Castle Street, coincidentally on the site of the former Congregational Chapel where Dylan’s parents were married in 1903.
This was a time of great productivity for Dylan’s poetry. At the age of 18 the first of his poems to be published outside of Wales, ‘And Death Shall have No Dominion’, was published in the New England Weekly. Like many Anglo-Welsh writers of the day, Thomas moved to London in his pursuit of literary success, and with the publication of ’18 Poems’ in December 1934, he began to attract attention from big hitters in the London poetry world such as T.S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell.
Having met Caitlin Macnamara in 1936 in the Wheatsheaf Pub in London’s West End, they embarked on a passionate affair culminating in their marriage on 11 July 1937 in Mousehole, Cornwall, against the wishes of Dylan’s parents. Their nomadic lifestyle saw them move from London to Wales, then to Oxford, and following a brief sojourn to Ireland and Italy, they eventually settled in the small Welsh coastal town of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire during the spring of 1938. The couple had three children, Llewelyn Edouard (1939-2000), Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis (1943-2009) and Colm Garan Hart (born 1949).
The couple’s tumultuous relationship is well documented, not least in Caitlin’s own memoirs of their married life, entitled ‘Leftover Life to Kill’ and ‘Double Drink story‘ (published posthumously), which describe the couple’s fiery partnership, exacerbated by mutual infidelities and a fondness for alcohol. Dylan himself referred to their union as “raw, red bleeding meat”. However, the couple remained together until Dylan’s death in 1953. And whilst Caitlin eventually remarried and relocated to Italy, following her own death in 1994 she was buried with Dylan in Laugharne.
Much of Dylan’s popularity both at home and abroad stemmed from his descriptive lyrical prose and his ability to depict a Wales few Welsh people in the industrial age ever got to see. Nevertheless, he portrayed an image of ‘Welshness’ that was held dear to the hearts of many Welsh men and women. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dylan’s poetry did not focus on the bleak images of the industrial depression. Where he does refer to industrial terminology, such as in the poem’ All All And All’, he combines it with the beauty of nature.
Through the character Rev Eli Jenkins in one of his best-known works, the ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood (which was later made famous by another equally iconic Welshman, Richard Burton) Dylan taps into that collective ‘Welshness’ to which many are so fiercely loyal: “I know there are Towns lovelier than ours, And fairer hills and loftier far…But let me choose and oh! I should Love all my life and longer To stroll among our trees and stray In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down, And hear the Dewi sing all day, And never, never leave the town.”
It was at the beginning of the Second World War, when Thomas’ ill health (he had suffered from bronchitis and asthma since childhood) prevented him from being called up, that he moved into script-writing, scripting films for the Ministry of Information. The scripts he produced for film and radio were often performed by Dylan himself, and his resonant voice and ability to capture a multitude of accents and expressions only served to increase his popularity throughout the world, particularly in America, where his subtle Welsh tones became nearly as famous as his poetry and plays themselves.
However, as his popularity rose it was also during this time that Thomas gained a reputation as a heavy drinker. Having been drawn to the tragic romance of poets like Byron and Keats, both Dylan and Caitlyn indulged in a hedonistic lifestyle of which alcohol was the epicentre.
Whilst in New York to promote ‘Under Milk Wood‘ in the winter of 1953, Dylan was taken ill and had to cancel several engagements. Despite being visited by his physician, Dr. Feltenstein, on numerous occasions his condition deteriorated and morphine injections administered in error by the Doctor left him struggling to breathe. By the time he was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent’s Hospital he had turned blue and slipped into a coma. Doctors diagnosed a severe case of bronchitis and an x-ray confirmed that Dylan was also suffering from pneumonia. The infection worsened and on 9 November Dylan died, never having regained consciousness.
Immediately after his death and in the years that followed, Dylan’s lifestyle prompted speculation that he had actually drunk himself to death. The image of the rebellious free-living artist who feel victim to his own excesses was infinitely more dramatic than the reality. Despite his heavy drinking his post mortem showed very little sign of the cirrhosis associated with alcohol-related deaths.
While there are times when the often embellished tales of Dylan’s tempestuous relationship with both Caitlin and alcohol have threatened to overshadow the achievements of his literary work, today it is an indisputable fact that Dylan has gone into history as one of Wales’ most celebrated sons.
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury MSgt Paul Connors
(7)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
Dylan Thomas discusses poetry and film (1953)
Extracts from the 'Cinema 16' symposium "Poetry and the Film" held in New York in October 28 1953, attended by Dylan Thomas less than 2 weeks before his unti...
Dylan Thomas discusses poetry and film (1953)
Extracts from the 'Cinema 16' symposium "Poetry and the Film" held in New York in October 28 1953, attended by Dylan Thomas less than 2 weeks before his untimely death at the age of 39 on 9 November 1953. The Welsh poet can be heard gently mocking the pretensions of the evening's topic, to the great amusement of the audience (other participants included Arthur Miller, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler and Willard Maas). The event would turn out to be Dylan Thomas's penultimate public appearance. In the early hours of 5 November 1953 he fell into a coma and died on 9 November 1953 (from undiagnosed and untreated pneumonia).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyavcLn2_uo
Images:
1. Dylan Thomas and Caitlin Thomas in a pub
2. Caitlin Thomas with son Colm Thomas, and daughter Aeronwy and her arm in a sling
3. Dylan Thomas 'Time held me green and dying. Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
4. Dylan Thomas’s boathouse at Laugharne
Background from {[https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ [login to see] [login to see] /odnb [login to see] 128-e-36471]}
Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–1953), poet, was born on 27 October 1914 at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the second child and only son of David John (Jack) Thomas (1876–1952), schoolmaster, and his wife, Florence Hannah (1882–1958), daughter of George Williams, railwayman, and his wife, Hannah. Both sides of the family had their roots in rural south Wales. Jack Thomas, the clever son of another railwayman, Evan, and his wife, Ann, came from a bilingual background where English was seen as the language of progress. To his disappointment, a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, led only to a schoolmaster's career, teaching English at the grammar school in Swansea, a comparatively Anglicized town, where he concealed the fact that he spoke Welsh. His model was the English man of letters.
Early years and early poetry
At an early age Dylan was being told about English prosody. A poem from his childhood, preserved by Florence Thomas, rhymed ‘real’ with ‘steel’; on the manuscript the father wrote, 'Real is two syllables and cannot rhyme with steel'. There were Celtic influences as well. Jack Thomas named his son after a minor figure in the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh tales, more or less inventing Dylan as a forename. The original Welsh pronunciation was ‘Dullan’, but Thomas as an adult preferred ‘Dillan’. His second name acknowledged a paternal great-uncle William, a preacher-poet in the Welsh language whose bardic pseudonym, Gwilym Marles, derived from the local River Marlais.
Dylan Thomas's upbringing in the Uplands, a genteel district on rising ground a mile west of Swansea's town centre, was suburban and orthodox. A garrulous sister, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), outshone him at first. Commonplace scenes and characters from childhood recur in his writing: the park that adjoins Cwmdonkin Drive; the bay and sands that were visible from the windows; a maternal aunt he visited, Ann Jones, a farmer's wife at Fernhill, in Carmarthenshire. His juvenilia was accomplished, as in 'The Mishap', about 'little sonny' who blew himself up by mistake:
Ask of the breeze from foreign shoresWhere sonny lingers?North tells of nose, East speaks of toes,West whispers fingers.
An undistinguished pupil at the school where his father taught (although he edited the school magazine), Thomas left in the summer of 1931, aged sixteen, to work for the local evening newspaper. There he wrote on literary topics whenever he could, and cultivated a mock-journalistic manner. The autobiographical stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog show a self-conscious transition from shy child to tormented adolescent, a would-be provincial rebel hoping that drunkenness and loud shirts would shock his elders.
Thomas's private life as a poet was already underway. As he wrote each poem he copied it, with the date, into a student's exercise book, an orderliness that contrasted sharply with his louche exterior. Eventually there were four such notebooks, running from 1930 to 1934, containing more than 200 poems. After his brief career as a journalist ended early in 1933 he continued to live at home, ostensibly unemployed, filling the notebooks faster than ever. Half the ninety published poems by which he is known were written, in one form or another, during these early years. His imagery often dwelt on the body—the 'lily bones' of an unborn child, man's 'candle in the thighs', the 'darkness in the weather of the eye'. Echoes of Blake and Donne could be detected, but his voice was his own. It was very personal poetry, indifferent to the social and political concerns of the day. He was painfully aware of sex, time, decay, and death; he also had a powerful sense of his vocation as a poet, easily caricatured by detractors later on.
Gaining fame as a poet and as a personality
Thomas's first poem to be seen in London, the bombastic 'And death shall have no dominion', was published by the New English Weekly in May 1933. A more characteristic piece, 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower', in which he saw the same energies at work in nature and in the flesh, was published by a newspaper, the Sunday Referee, in October the same year, two days after his nineteenth birthday. In March 1934 the BBC's journal, The Listener, printed another of his ‘organic’ poems:
Light breaks where no sun shines;Where no sea runs, the waters of the heartPush in their tides.
As a result, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender wrote to Thomas, and a selection of his verse, sponsored by the Referee, appeared later in the year as Eighteen Poems. This was followed in 1936 by Twenty-Five Poems, establishing his reputation in literary circles, although elsewhere he remained unknown. A visionary quality was noted, along with his verbal skills; so was intermittent obscurity. Because Thomas was digging deep into the notebooks, many of the poems published in the second volume had been written before those published in the first. He was never again as fecund as in the Swansea years.
An impish, scandalous figure on the London literary scene of the mid-1930s, Thomas lived by tiny fees for poems and stories, occasional book reviewing, and frequent borrowing from friends. Swansea was always available for home comforts. His early friendships there were enduring, notably with Alfred Janes, the painter, Daniel Jones, the composer, and Vernon Watkins, the poet. In appearance Thomas was slight and cherubic, with wavy hair and luminous eyes. A passivity of nature, together with a convenient conviction that the poet's vocation called for charitable treatment, made him unashamedly dependent on others.
Dylan Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara [see Thomas (1913–1994)], a fiery woman with artistic tastes, on 11 July 1937, having met her in a London pub the previous year, and came to rely on her strength of character. Initially Thomas liked to see them as two innocents in a wicked world, a fantasy that soon wore thin. The relationship was passionate, stormy, and ultimately dysfunctional. Married life before the Second World War found them scraping along in poverty, staying with her divorced mother at Blashford in the New Forest or with his parents in Swansea. In Laugharne, a small township on the Carmarthenshire coast not far from his family origins, they lived in rented houses, first Eros and then Sea View (Thomas never owned a property of any kind), with intermittent binges in London: 'city of the restless dead', as he called it in a 1938 letter to Vernon Watkins, adding that 'its intelligentsia is so hurried in the head that nothing stays there; its glamour smells of goat' (Collected Letters, 392–3). His drinking and clowning were indispensable to him, but they were only half the story; 'I am as domestic as a slipper' (Ferris, Dylan Thomas, 155–6) he once observed, with some truth. In this he was the opposite of his wife.
A further sixteen poems, together with seven short stories, made up The Map of Love (1939). 'I make this in a warring absence', originally published as 'Poem (for Caitlin)', expressed forgiveness for her sexual infidelity, of which Thomas was evidently aware. But the lavish imagery of the poem, and of others in the collection, required the skills of a cipher clerk to interpret. There were exceptions, notably the elegiac 'After the Funeral', a reworking of a notebook poem from 1933 that commemorated Ann Jones, the aunt at Fernhill. The seven stories, selected from the twenty or so that magazines had published since 1934, were baroque fantasies, often tiresome. The ten stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) have proved more durable: nostalgic, amusing, largely true-life romances about himself in Wales.
Living on 'guile and beer'
In the Second World War, Thomas used subterfuge and his recurrent asthma to avoid military service. Work in a munitions factory would have been almost as distasteful. '[D]eary me,' he wrote to a friend, 'I'd rather be a poet anyday and live on guile and beer' (Collected Letters, 540). Even before wartime conditions jeopardized literary earnings, Thomas had begun to develop begging as a form of income. His ‘Five Bob Fund’ envisaged twelve benefactors (Peggy Guggenheim, Augustus John, and Lord Tredegar were on the list) who would each send him 5s. a week; the resulting £3 promised security. When the scheme failed to mature, he wrote at random to literary figures. Hearing that the author Alec Waugh had suggested Dylan 'write more stories and fewer letters', he suggested tartly that Alec 'write fewer stories and more letters' (ibid., 538).
Salvation came from a film company, where Thomas wrote morale-building scripts for the Ministry of Information. For the first time since his journalist days he had a regular income, and he (and sometimes his wife) were in London for much of the war, staying with friends or renting squalid rooms of their own. The legend of the outrageous poet, which Thomas actively encouraged, has made his life seem even more disorganized than it was. His reputation as a saloon-bar raconteur was well established. But in wartime London he kept appointments, respected deadlines, and, if he was occasionally unfaithful to his wife, quickly crept back to the safety of the marriage.
Throughout his life, few of Thomas's poems were written outside Wales. Towards the end of the war he lived in west Wales for a year—at Llangain, near Carmarthen, then at New Quay, on Cardigan Bay—enjoying a burst of creativity that would not be repeated. The seven poems he wrote included two that came to be enjoyed by many who were deterred by his more complex work. 'Poem in October' celebrated his thirtieth year, and 'Fern Hill', Thomas's best-known poem, dwelt on the Carmarthenshire farm and his childhood. Both pieces were direct and alluring (although 'Fern Hill' is a meditation on time as well as an exercise in nostalgia), and were open to charges of sentimentality. Their themes suggest a turning away from wartime privations, as well as the gathering disquiet of a former enfant terrible.
These seven poems, together with seventeen others, were collected into a tiny pocket-sized volume, Deaths and Entrances, in 1946. Three of the pieces, including 'The Hunchback in the Park'—the Cwmdonkin Park where Thomas had played as a child—originated in the early notebooks, the last of his work to carry these echoes. The collection ranged widely. Another of the late poems, 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London', cunningly verbose, had the ring of a funeral oration with Christian trappings:
I shall not murderThe mankind of her going with a grave truthNor blaspheme down the stations of the breathWith any furtherElegy of innocence and youth.
A religious poet, or at least a poet making religious gestures, can be detected in Deaths and Entrances. But by 1946 Thomas's progress in any direction had begun to waver. His domestic affairs were increasingly muddled. There were now two small children, a son, Llewelyn, and a daughter, Aeronwy, to accompany their nomadic parents. Caitlin was impatient of her husband's fecklessness. Dylan himself toyed with the idea that the family could escape to America—where his poems, together with some prose, had already appeared in two collections, The World I Breathe (1939) and New Poems (1943)—but nothing came of this idea.
The BBC and writing in the post-war years
Work for radio kept Thomas busy. The BBC used him to write scripts for its overseas services during the war, and came to see his more general potential as a broadcaster. A number of separate reminiscences—where he talked about childhood, Christmas, holidays—drew on the same nostalgia as the poems to produce softer-edged memories, affectionate and humorous. His florid style of reading had its critics at the BBC, where an executive spoke of 'that breathless poetic voice' (Maud, On the Air, 9). Thomas learned to temper it, but the booming delivery was still there, with its overstressed syllables and elegant enunciation, a Welsh accent lurking within. He was continually in demand to read and discuss verse and to act in the literary plays and features that were then in their heyday at the BBC, which invented its Third Programme in 1946 to cater for such things. Among his many roles was Satan in a serial version of Paradise Lost. Thomas's voice became familiar to many who had never read the poetry.
Broadcasting helped keep Thomas afloat after the war. It also gave him frequent excuses to be in London, visiting studios and moving on to convivial pubs around Broadcasting House. His wife, at home with the children in Oxford—where the Thomases temporarily settled—suffered, although not in silence. The composer Elisabeth Lutyens, one of his drinking companions, saw Dylan about to leave for home, carrying a battered briefcase with a gift that was meant to placate Caitlin. Lutyens looked inside. It contained two cans of soup.
For two years after 'Fern Hill' Thomas wrote no poetry. In 1947 Edith Sitwell arranged a travelling scholarship and recommended he seek inspiration in Italy, where he and his family stayed for four months. He spent much of his time groaning at the heat and writing comic letters of complaint to friends. The visit produced one long and rather laboured poem, 'In Country Sleep'. On their returning to England the Thomases were housed at the expense of Margaret Taylor, wife of the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor, who (to her husband's dismay) had become Thomas's friend and patron. Previously she had let them live in a summerhouse at the bottom of the Taylors' garden, and when Thomas was in Italy she bought a cottage in the village of South Leigh, 10 miles from Oxford, and let it to him for a token rent, often unpaid.
Despite his permanent air of a man facing financial ruin, Thomas was far from destitute. For a period he wrote feature-film treatments and additional dialogue. A script about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare was taken up by the Rank organization and then abandoned; later it was published as The Doctor and the Devils. Altogether his declared earnings in the fiscal year 1947–8 were £2400, a respectable income for a self-employed writer at the time.
By 1948 Thomas had decided that his only hope as a poet was to return to Wales. Mrs Taylor (who was not rich) bought a property for him to occupy in Laugharne, the Boat House, and the Thomases moved there in spring 1949, where he promptly wrote a topographical poem about the town, 'Over Sir John's Hill'. Caitlin's third child, a boy, Colm, was born in July. In Laugharne, Thomas's life fell into disarray. His letters breathe anxiety, and four further poems took another two years to write. Money was swallowed up by private education for the children as well as by taxis, alcohol, and his wife's clothes, and unpaid tax on earlier income had to be found. Meanwhile scripts paid for by the BBC went unwritten.
When John Malcolm Brinnin, newly appointed director of the Poetry Center at the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York city, invited him to visit America, Thomas accepted at once, and went there in 1950. His readings at the centre, and on campuses across the country, introduced him to young, enthusiastic audiences and gave rise to a legend, exaggerated in the telling, of the wild poet behaving badly. The three-month tour was lucrative, but once again the taxman was waiting. His wife accompanied him on a second visit in 1952, having learned that he had slept with a woman in New York two years earlier. The adulation of student audiences, 'screaming at him as though he was a pop singer' aroused her jealousy (Ferris, Caitlin, 126). This time the tour lasted four months, wearying Thomas. Both he and his wife drank heavily, as though competing. At one lecture, at the University of Utah, he described himself as 'a little fat man come to make a fool of himself' (Ferris, Dylan Thomas, 287).
Thomas's health was deteriorating. He coughed and wheezed, suffered bouts of gout and gastritis, and had long since ballooned into a caricature of the pretty young poet whom Augustus John had painted. The publication of Collected Poems, 1934–1952, just after his thirty-eighth birthday, offered a respite, assembling the contents of his three earlier volumes, together with the five new Laugharne poems. In general the critics approved. Philip Toynbee thought him 'the greatest living poet in the English language' (Observer, 11 Nov 1952). The collection won the Foyle's poetry prize.
Among the late poems was an elegy to his dying father, in the rare form of a villanelle, which began, 'Do not go gentle into that good night', a line that became a figure of speech. Jack Thomas died shortly after the book was published. Other work that would give Dylan Thomas a popular currency which transcended literary opinion was in the making. In America he had recorded A Child's Christmas in Wales, cobbled together from a radio reminiscence and a magazine article.
Under Milk Wood, final years, and reputation
In particular there was a BBC 'play for voices' that Thomas had been trying to finish for years, essentially a series of comic sketches with darker undertones about twenty-four hours in the life of a town called Llareggub—a backwards-reading joke that he resurrected from an early story. The play became Under Milk Wood, a poor relation to the poetry, in Thomas's view, but the work by which he is best known. It was completed in spring 1953, during a third visit to America, and first performed there on the stage. (From 1954 it was also broadcast many times on BBC radio in a production with Richard Burton as narrator.) A love affair that Thomas began with Brinnin's assistant, Elizabeth Reitell, was matched by Caitlin's blatant infidelities in Laugharne.
Fears about the future run through letters and manuscript notes of Thomas's last years. After 1951 he failed to complete another poem. Finding himself unable or unwilling to mature as a poet who would meet the exacting, unrealistic standards of what he saw as his vocation, he let despair lead him towards self-destruction. In October he returned to America, Reitell, and exhaustion. Drinking heavily, he became ill and intermittently deranged about the time of his thirty-ninth birthday at the end of the month. On 4 November a doctor unwisely sedated him by injecting half a grain of morphine, which was to prove fatal. He collapsed and went into a coma, and died in St Vincent's Hospital, New York, on 9 November. Pial oedema (swollen brain tissue) was given as the immediate cause of death, with fatty liver and pneumonia as antecedent causes. No mention was made of the morphine. Later suggestions that undiagnosed diabetes was significant can be discounted. His body was returned to Wales and interred at Laugharne on 24 November 1953.
A memorial plaque in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey was dedicated in 1982. The Boat House at Laugharne has been restored for visitors, and in Swansea a Dylan Thomas Centre with a permanent exhibition of written and visual material was opened in 1996. The ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literary tradition, which is Welsh in spirit but not in language, has found an emblem in Thomas. His Welshness, however, owes more to nostalgia for the countryside of his childhood than to any national consciousness, and his work has little to commend it to modern Welsh separatists.
In wider terms Thomas's popular reputation has continued to grow, even if critics have not always been kind. Some had already found his work too florid by the time of his death, and the British Movement poets (Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and others) began a dismissive tendency that has persisted among those who prefer their poetry served cold.
Paradoxically, it is Thomas's rhetoric and romanticism that appeal so widely to the non-specialist reader, and his more accessible poems are widely anthologized. His position in the English tradition seems secure; Donne, Blake, and Yeats are among the precursors cited, with reservations. His own wry assessment—using a metaphor from cricket, the only game that interested him—that he was 'top of the second eleven' (Fitzgibbon, 49) may be near the truth.
Sources
• private information (2004)
• P. Ferris, Dylan Thomas, rev. edn (1999)
• The collected letters of Dylan Thomas, ed. P. Ferris, rev. edn (2000)
• P. Ferris, Caitlin: the life of Caitlin Thomas (1993)
• D. M. Thomas, Portrait of the artist as a young dog (1940)
• C. FitzGibbon, The life of Dylan Thomas (1965)
• J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (1956)
• Dylan Thomas: the notebook poems, 1930–1934, ed. R. Maud (1989)
• Dylan Thomas: collected poems, 1934–1953, ed. W. Davies and R. Maud (1989)
• D. Thomas, Under Milk Wood, ed. W. Davies and R. Maud (1995)
• R. Maud, Dylan Thomas in print: a bibliographical history (1970)
• G. Watkins, Portrait of a friend (1983)
• D. Jones, My friend Dylan Thomas (1977)
• On the air with Dylan Thomas: the broadcasts, ed. R. Maud (1991)
• J. Nashold and G. Tremlett, The death of Dylan Thomas (1997)
• d. cert., New York department of health, bureau of records and statistics
Archives
• Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp., poems, and papers
• NL Wales, letters
• Ransom HRC, papers of and relating to Thomas
• University of Toronto, Victoria University, letters
• BL, letters to Vernon Watkins, Add. MS 52612
• NL Wales, letters to Desmond Hawkins; letters to Percy Eynon Smart
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Extracts from the 'Cinema 16' symposium "Poetry and the Film" held in New York in October 28 1953, attended by Dylan Thomas less than 2 weeks before his untimely death at the age of 39 on 9 November 1953. The Welsh poet can be heard gently mocking the pretensions of the evening's topic, to the great amusement of the audience (other participants included Arthur Miller, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler and Willard Maas). The event would turn out to be Dylan Thomas's penultimate public appearance. In the early hours of 5 November 1953 he fell into a coma and died on 9 November 1953 (from undiagnosed and untreated pneumonia).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyavcLn2_uo
Images:
1. Dylan Thomas and Caitlin Thomas in a pub
2. Caitlin Thomas with son Colm Thomas, and daughter Aeronwy and her arm in a sling
3. Dylan Thomas 'Time held me green and dying. Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
4. Dylan Thomas’s boathouse at Laugharne
Background from {[https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ [login to see] [login to see] /odnb [login to see] 128-e-36471]}
Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–1953), poet, was born on 27 October 1914 at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the second child and only son of David John (Jack) Thomas (1876–1952), schoolmaster, and his wife, Florence Hannah (1882–1958), daughter of George Williams, railwayman, and his wife, Hannah. Both sides of the family had their roots in rural south Wales. Jack Thomas, the clever son of another railwayman, Evan, and his wife, Ann, came from a bilingual background where English was seen as the language of progress. To his disappointment, a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, led only to a schoolmaster's career, teaching English at the grammar school in Swansea, a comparatively Anglicized town, where he concealed the fact that he spoke Welsh. His model was the English man of letters.
Early years and early poetry
At an early age Dylan was being told about English prosody. A poem from his childhood, preserved by Florence Thomas, rhymed ‘real’ with ‘steel’; on the manuscript the father wrote, 'Real is two syllables and cannot rhyme with steel'. There were Celtic influences as well. Jack Thomas named his son after a minor figure in the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh tales, more or less inventing Dylan as a forename. The original Welsh pronunciation was ‘Dullan’, but Thomas as an adult preferred ‘Dillan’. His second name acknowledged a paternal great-uncle William, a preacher-poet in the Welsh language whose bardic pseudonym, Gwilym Marles, derived from the local River Marlais.
Dylan Thomas's upbringing in the Uplands, a genteel district on rising ground a mile west of Swansea's town centre, was suburban and orthodox. A garrulous sister, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), outshone him at first. Commonplace scenes and characters from childhood recur in his writing: the park that adjoins Cwmdonkin Drive; the bay and sands that were visible from the windows; a maternal aunt he visited, Ann Jones, a farmer's wife at Fernhill, in Carmarthenshire. His juvenilia was accomplished, as in 'The Mishap', about 'little sonny' who blew himself up by mistake:
Ask of the breeze from foreign shoresWhere sonny lingers?North tells of nose, East speaks of toes,West whispers fingers.
An undistinguished pupil at the school where his father taught (although he edited the school magazine), Thomas left in the summer of 1931, aged sixteen, to work for the local evening newspaper. There he wrote on literary topics whenever he could, and cultivated a mock-journalistic manner. The autobiographical stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog show a self-conscious transition from shy child to tormented adolescent, a would-be provincial rebel hoping that drunkenness and loud shirts would shock his elders.
Thomas's private life as a poet was already underway. As he wrote each poem he copied it, with the date, into a student's exercise book, an orderliness that contrasted sharply with his louche exterior. Eventually there were four such notebooks, running from 1930 to 1934, containing more than 200 poems. After his brief career as a journalist ended early in 1933 he continued to live at home, ostensibly unemployed, filling the notebooks faster than ever. Half the ninety published poems by which he is known were written, in one form or another, during these early years. His imagery often dwelt on the body—the 'lily bones' of an unborn child, man's 'candle in the thighs', the 'darkness in the weather of the eye'. Echoes of Blake and Donne could be detected, but his voice was his own. It was very personal poetry, indifferent to the social and political concerns of the day. He was painfully aware of sex, time, decay, and death; he also had a powerful sense of his vocation as a poet, easily caricatured by detractors later on.
Gaining fame as a poet and as a personality
Thomas's first poem to be seen in London, the bombastic 'And death shall have no dominion', was published by the New English Weekly in May 1933. A more characteristic piece, 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower', in which he saw the same energies at work in nature and in the flesh, was published by a newspaper, the Sunday Referee, in October the same year, two days after his nineteenth birthday. In March 1934 the BBC's journal, The Listener, printed another of his ‘organic’ poems:
Light breaks where no sun shines;Where no sea runs, the waters of the heartPush in their tides.
As a result, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender wrote to Thomas, and a selection of his verse, sponsored by the Referee, appeared later in the year as Eighteen Poems. This was followed in 1936 by Twenty-Five Poems, establishing his reputation in literary circles, although elsewhere he remained unknown. A visionary quality was noted, along with his verbal skills; so was intermittent obscurity. Because Thomas was digging deep into the notebooks, many of the poems published in the second volume had been written before those published in the first. He was never again as fecund as in the Swansea years.
An impish, scandalous figure on the London literary scene of the mid-1930s, Thomas lived by tiny fees for poems and stories, occasional book reviewing, and frequent borrowing from friends. Swansea was always available for home comforts. His early friendships there were enduring, notably with Alfred Janes, the painter, Daniel Jones, the composer, and Vernon Watkins, the poet. In appearance Thomas was slight and cherubic, with wavy hair and luminous eyes. A passivity of nature, together with a convenient conviction that the poet's vocation called for charitable treatment, made him unashamedly dependent on others.
Dylan Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara [see Thomas (1913–1994)], a fiery woman with artistic tastes, on 11 July 1937, having met her in a London pub the previous year, and came to rely on her strength of character. Initially Thomas liked to see them as two innocents in a wicked world, a fantasy that soon wore thin. The relationship was passionate, stormy, and ultimately dysfunctional. Married life before the Second World War found them scraping along in poverty, staying with her divorced mother at Blashford in the New Forest or with his parents in Swansea. In Laugharne, a small township on the Carmarthenshire coast not far from his family origins, they lived in rented houses, first Eros and then Sea View (Thomas never owned a property of any kind), with intermittent binges in London: 'city of the restless dead', as he called it in a 1938 letter to Vernon Watkins, adding that 'its intelligentsia is so hurried in the head that nothing stays there; its glamour smells of goat' (Collected Letters, 392–3). His drinking and clowning were indispensable to him, but they were only half the story; 'I am as domestic as a slipper' (Ferris, Dylan Thomas, 155–6) he once observed, with some truth. In this he was the opposite of his wife.
A further sixteen poems, together with seven short stories, made up The Map of Love (1939). 'I make this in a warring absence', originally published as 'Poem (for Caitlin)', expressed forgiveness for her sexual infidelity, of which Thomas was evidently aware. But the lavish imagery of the poem, and of others in the collection, required the skills of a cipher clerk to interpret. There were exceptions, notably the elegiac 'After the Funeral', a reworking of a notebook poem from 1933 that commemorated Ann Jones, the aunt at Fernhill. The seven stories, selected from the twenty or so that magazines had published since 1934, were baroque fantasies, often tiresome. The ten stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) have proved more durable: nostalgic, amusing, largely true-life romances about himself in Wales.
Living on 'guile and beer'
In the Second World War, Thomas used subterfuge and his recurrent asthma to avoid military service. Work in a munitions factory would have been almost as distasteful. '[D]eary me,' he wrote to a friend, 'I'd rather be a poet anyday and live on guile and beer' (Collected Letters, 540). Even before wartime conditions jeopardized literary earnings, Thomas had begun to develop begging as a form of income. His ‘Five Bob Fund’ envisaged twelve benefactors (Peggy Guggenheim, Augustus John, and Lord Tredegar were on the list) who would each send him 5s. a week; the resulting £3 promised security. When the scheme failed to mature, he wrote at random to literary figures. Hearing that the author Alec Waugh had suggested Dylan 'write more stories and fewer letters', he suggested tartly that Alec 'write fewer stories and more letters' (ibid., 538).
Salvation came from a film company, where Thomas wrote morale-building scripts for the Ministry of Information. For the first time since his journalist days he had a regular income, and he (and sometimes his wife) were in London for much of the war, staying with friends or renting squalid rooms of their own. The legend of the outrageous poet, which Thomas actively encouraged, has made his life seem even more disorganized than it was. His reputation as a saloon-bar raconteur was well established. But in wartime London he kept appointments, respected deadlines, and, if he was occasionally unfaithful to his wife, quickly crept back to the safety of the marriage.
Throughout his life, few of Thomas's poems were written outside Wales. Towards the end of the war he lived in west Wales for a year—at Llangain, near Carmarthen, then at New Quay, on Cardigan Bay—enjoying a burst of creativity that would not be repeated. The seven poems he wrote included two that came to be enjoyed by many who were deterred by his more complex work. 'Poem in October' celebrated his thirtieth year, and 'Fern Hill', Thomas's best-known poem, dwelt on the Carmarthenshire farm and his childhood. Both pieces were direct and alluring (although 'Fern Hill' is a meditation on time as well as an exercise in nostalgia), and were open to charges of sentimentality. Their themes suggest a turning away from wartime privations, as well as the gathering disquiet of a former enfant terrible.
These seven poems, together with seventeen others, were collected into a tiny pocket-sized volume, Deaths and Entrances, in 1946. Three of the pieces, including 'The Hunchback in the Park'—the Cwmdonkin Park where Thomas had played as a child—originated in the early notebooks, the last of his work to carry these echoes. The collection ranged widely. Another of the late poems, 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London', cunningly verbose, had the ring of a funeral oration with Christian trappings:
I shall not murderThe mankind of her going with a grave truthNor blaspheme down the stations of the breathWith any furtherElegy of innocence and youth.
A religious poet, or at least a poet making religious gestures, can be detected in Deaths and Entrances. But by 1946 Thomas's progress in any direction had begun to waver. His domestic affairs were increasingly muddled. There were now two small children, a son, Llewelyn, and a daughter, Aeronwy, to accompany their nomadic parents. Caitlin was impatient of her husband's fecklessness. Dylan himself toyed with the idea that the family could escape to America—where his poems, together with some prose, had already appeared in two collections, The World I Breathe (1939) and New Poems (1943)—but nothing came of this idea.
The BBC and writing in the post-war years
Work for radio kept Thomas busy. The BBC used him to write scripts for its overseas services during the war, and came to see his more general potential as a broadcaster. A number of separate reminiscences—where he talked about childhood, Christmas, holidays—drew on the same nostalgia as the poems to produce softer-edged memories, affectionate and humorous. His florid style of reading had its critics at the BBC, where an executive spoke of 'that breathless poetic voice' (Maud, On the Air, 9). Thomas learned to temper it, but the booming delivery was still there, with its overstressed syllables and elegant enunciation, a Welsh accent lurking within. He was continually in demand to read and discuss verse and to act in the literary plays and features that were then in their heyday at the BBC, which invented its Third Programme in 1946 to cater for such things. Among his many roles was Satan in a serial version of Paradise Lost. Thomas's voice became familiar to many who had never read the poetry.
Broadcasting helped keep Thomas afloat after the war. It also gave him frequent excuses to be in London, visiting studios and moving on to convivial pubs around Broadcasting House. His wife, at home with the children in Oxford—where the Thomases temporarily settled—suffered, although not in silence. The composer Elisabeth Lutyens, one of his drinking companions, saw Dylan about to leave for home, carrying a battered briefcase with a gift that was meant to placate Caitlin. Lutyens looked inside. It contained two cans of soup.
For two years after 'Fern Hill' Thomas wrote no poetry. In 1947 Edith Sitwell arranged a travelling scholarship and recommended he seek inspiration in Italy, where he and his family stayed for four months. He spent much of his time groaning at the heat and writing comic letters of complaint to friends. The visit produced one long and rather laboured poem, 'In Country Sleep'. On their returning to England the Thomases were housed at the expense of Margaret Taylor, wife of the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor, who (to her husband's dismay) had become Thomas's friend and patron. Previously she had let them live in a summerhouse at the bottom of the Taylors' garden, and when Thomas was in Italy she bought a cottage in the village of South Leigh, 10 miles from Oxford, and let it to him for a token rent, often unpaid.
Despite his permanent air of a man facing financial ruin, Thomas was far from destitute. For a period he wrote feature-film treatments and additional dialogue. A script about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare was taken up by the Rank organization and then abandoned; later it was published as The Doctor and the Devils. Altogether his declared earnings in the fiscal year 1947–8 were £2400, a respectable income for a self-employed writer at the time.
By 1948 Thomas had decided that his only hope as a poet was to return to Wales. Mrs Taylor (who was not rich) bought a property for him to occupy in Laugharne, the Boat House, and the Thomases moved there in spring 1949, where he promptly wrote a topographical poem about the town, 'Over Sir John's Hill'. Caitlin's third child, a boy, Colm, was born in July. In Laugharne, Thomas's life fell into disarray. His letters breathe anxiety, and four further poems took another two years to write. Money was swallowed up by private education for the children as well as by taxis, alcohol, and his wife's clothes, and unpaid tax on earlier income had to be found. Meanwhile scripts paid for by the BBC went unwritten.
When John Malcolm Brinnin, newly appointed director of the Poetry Center at the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York city, invited him to visit America, Thomas accepted at once, and went there in 1950. His readings at the centre, and on campuses across the country, introduced him to young, enthusiastic audiences and gave rise to a legend, exaggerated in the telling, of the wild poet behaving badly. The three-month tour was lucrative, but once again the taxman was waiting. His wife accompanied him on a second visit in 1952, having learned that he had slept with a woman in New York two years earlier. The adulation of student audiences, 'screaming at him as though he was a pop singer' aroused her jealousy (Ferris, Caitlin, 126). This time the tour lasted four months, wearying Thomas. Both he and his wife drank heavily, as though competing. At one lecture, at the University of Utah, he described himself as 'a little fat man come to make a fool of himself' (Ferris, Dylan Thomas, 287).
Thomas's health was deteriorating. He coughed and wheezed, suffered bouts of gout and gastritis, and had long since ballooned into a caricature of the pretty young poet whom Augustus John had painted. The publication of Collected Poems, 1934–1952, just after his thirty-eighth birthday, offered a respite, assembling the contents of his three earlier volumes, together with the five new Laugharne poems. In general the critics approved. Philip Toynbee thought him 'the greatest living poet in the English language' (Observer, 11 Nov 1952). The collection won the Foyle's poetry prize.
Among the late poems was an elegy to his dying father, in the rare form of a villanelle, which began, 'Do not go gentle into that good night', a line that became a figure of speech. Jack Thomas died shortly after the book was published. Other work that would give Dylan Thomas a popular currency which transcended literary opinion was in the making. In America he had recorded A Child's Christmas in Wales, cobbled together from a radio reminiscence and a magazine article.
Under Milk Wood, final years, and reputation
In particular there was a BBC 'play for voices' that Thomas had been trying to finish for years, essentially a series of comic sketches with darker undertones about twenty-four hours in the life of a town called Llareggub—a backwards-reading joke that he resurrected from an early story. The play became Under Milk Wood, a poor relation to the poetry, in Thomas's view, but the work by which he is best known. It was completed in spring 1953, during a third visit to America, and first performed there on the stage. (From 1954 it was also broadcast many times on BBC radio in a production with Richard Burton as narrator.) A love affair that Thomas began with Brinnin's assistant, Elizabeth Reitell, was matched by Caitlin's blatant infidelities in Laugharne.
Fears about the future run through letters and manuscript notes of Thomas's last years. After 1951 he failed to complete another poem. Finding himself unable or unwilling to mature as a poet who would meet the exacting, unrealistic standards of what he saw as his vocation, he let despair lead him towards self-destruction. In October he returned to America, Reitell, and exhaustion. Drinking heavily, he became ill and intermittently deranged about the time of his thirty-ninth birthday at the end of the month. On 4 November a doctor unwisely sedated him by injecting half a grain of morphine, which was to prove fatal. He collapsed and went into a coma, and died in St Vincent's Hospital, New York, on 9 November. Pial oedema (swollen brain tissue) was given as the immediate cause of death, with fatty liver and pneumonia as antecedent causes. No mention was made of the morphine. Later suggestions that undiagnosed diabetes was significant can be discounted. His body was returned to Wales and interred at Laugharne on 24 November 1953.
A memorial plaque in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey was dedicated in 1982. The Boat House at Laugharne has been restored for visitors, and in Swansea a Dylan Thomas Centre with a permanent exhibition of written and visual material was opened in 1996. The ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literary tradition, which is Welsh in spirit but not in language, has found an emblem in Thomas. His Welshness, however, owes more to nostalgia for the countryside of his childhood than to any national consciousness, and his work has little to commend it to modern Welsh separatists.
In wider terms Thomas's popular reputation has continued to grow, even if critics have not always been kind. Some had already found his work too florid by the time of his death, and the British Movement poets (Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and others) began a dismissive tendency that has persisted among those who prefer their poetry served cold.
Paradoxically, it is Thomas's rhetoric and romanticism that appeal so widely to the non-specialist reader, and his more accessible poems are widely anthologized. His position in the English tradition seems secure; Donne, Blake, and Yeats are among the precursors cited, with reservations. His own wry assessment—using a metaphor from cricket, the only game that interested him—that he was 'top of the second eleven' (Fitzgibbon, 49) may be near the truth.
Sources
• private information (2004)
• P. Ferris, Dylan Thomas, rev. edn (1999)
• The collected letters of Dylan Thomas, ed. P. Ferris, rev. edn (2000)
• P. Ferris, Caitlin: the life of Caitlin Thomas (1993)
• D. M. Thomas, Portrait of the artist as a young dog (1940)
• C. FitzGibbon, The life of Dylan Thomas (1965)
• J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (1956)
• Dylan Thomas: the notebook poems, 1930–1934, ed. R. Maud (1989)
• Dylan Thomas: collected poems, 1934–1953, ed. W. Davies and R. Maud (1989)
• D. Thomas, Under Milk Wood, ed. W. Davies and R. Maud (1995)
• R. Maud, Dylan Thomas in print: a bibliographical history (1970)
• G. Watkins, Portrait of a friend (1983)
• D. Jones, My friend Dylan Thomas (1977)
• On the air with Dylan Thomas: the broadcasts, ed. R. Maud (1991)
• J. Nashold and G. Tremlett, The death of Dylan Thomas (1997)
• d. cert., New York department of health, bureau of records and statistics
Archives
• Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp., poems, and papers
• NL Wales, letters
• Ransom HRC, papers of and relating to Thomas
• University of Toronto, Victoria University, letters
• BL, letters to Vernon Watkins, Add. MS 52612
• NL Wales, letters to Desmond Hawkins; letters to Percy Eynon Smart
FYI CPL Dave Hoover Sgt John H. Maj Wayne CristSGM Bill FrazerCSM (Join to see)SSG Jeffrey LeakeSSG Paul HeadleeSGM Major StroupeCPL Michael PeckSSG Jeff Furgerson]Sgt (Join to see)PO1 Steve Ditto SPC Michael Terrell CPL Douglas ChryslerSP5 Geoffrey Vannerson LTC John Shaw MSgt Paul Connors SPC Matthew Lamb GySgt John HudsonSP5 Jeannie Carle
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LTC Stephen F.
Dylan Thomas reads "Poem In October" and "In My Craft or Sullen Art" - 1949 Columbia LP
From the LP shown above, issued in 1950 on the Columbia Masterworks label, catalogue number ML 4259. Dylan Marlais Thomas (* 27. Oktober 1914 in Swansea, Wal...
Dylan Thomas reads "Poem In October" and "In My Craft or Sullen Art" - 1949 Columbia LP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XMaJanGuWI
Images:
1. Dylan Marlais Thomas by John Augustus 1937-1938
2. St Martin’s Church in Church Street. 'Dylan is buried here, in a very plain grave
3. Dylan Thomas' grave, Laugharne
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XMaJanGuWI
Images:
1. Dylan Marlais Thomas by John Augustus 1937-1938
2. St Martin’s Church in Church Street. 'Dylan is buried here, in a very plain grave
3. Dylan Thomas' grave, Laugharne
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
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