Dylan Thomas

Welsh poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter

• Born: October 27, 1914
• Birthplace: Swansea, Wales
• Died: November 9, 1953
• Place of death: New York, New York

Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas, born the second child of D. J. and Florence Thomas in Swansea, Wales, in 1914, is widely considered to be the greatest British poet of his generation. In addition to poetry, he wrote a famous radio play (Under Milk Wood), an autobiography, and highly imaginative short stories as well as screenplays and essays. He gained celebrity in Great Britain for British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio broadcasts of his and other poets’ works and received international acclaim for his public readings in the United States, where he died on November 9, 1953. Although Thomas struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, he may have died of a coma caused by medical mishandling of a severe lung infection than by alcohol poisoning.

Though Thomas’s total poetic output is modest, he was not so much a slow writer as a careful one, altering some of his poems more than two hundred times. He insisted that his work be read at its face value, preferably aloud. (Thomas once said that he wanted to be read, not read into.) His lyrical gifts are often linked to his Welsh background, along with the influence of particular poets, notably Gerard Manley Hopkins. Much of the criticism of the obscurity of his work has been irrelevant, because readers are supposed to allow the words to work on them, which they do in spite of the many private and esoteric references. Still, Thomas’s painstakingly crafted poetry was the product of a highly dialectical intellect and holds up to close rational analysis.

Thomas was a complex figure, a man of effusive good will who suffered agonies of guilt. While he tortuously worked through to a celebration of Christian belief in God and nature, his personal life revealed a man who wished to believe, to find faith, but who could not without great difficulty. Extremely sensitive, he projected his own guilt onto the world at large—its hypocrisy and greed, its general inhumanity. Two symptoms of this paradox were his telling the truth beyond the edge of tact and his profligate wastefulness of money, though he was miserable when the first resulted in hurt feelings and the second in poverty.

Many of Thomas’s poems reflect his love of the Welsh countryside. The setting of one of his most famous poems, “Fern Hill,” is his aunt and uncle’s farm, which he visited as a child. Much of what he had to say in these poems is concerned with that Edenic country world—its harmony with the rhythm of the earth in its emphasis on birth, marriage, death, rebirth, and a simple faith in God—or with the lost world of childhood innocence.

Thomas was educated in the Swansea grammar school, in which his strict, agnostic father was an English master. His juvenile poetry and prose were published frequently in the grammar school literary magazine. After completing his studies, Thomas briefly worked as a reporter and performed in the local theater. By the end of 1932, he was writing full time. When his first volume, Eighteen Poems, appeared, it was received enthusiastically by critics such as Edith Sitwell, though not by the general public, some of whom wrote virulent abuses to the Sunday Times. His poetry of this period was concerned almost entirely with personal problems and was made perhaps deliberately obscure by private imagery and a highly personalized rhetorical style.

Until World War II Thomas lived in London much of the time but visited Wales frequently. Short but broad, of huge energy, he had experiences that were in many ways those of any proud rural innocent; always scornful of hypocrisy and the unnatural, he found much to reject in the city. At the same time, his great warmth and talent made him many friends among its literary leaders. His way of adapting to this life was to mock convention with droll acts. During the war he served as an antiaircraft gunner; the sight of the war’s courage and suffering induced his second creative phase, one that revealed poignant feelings for others. When he began reading poetry over the BBC, he developed a following among the general public. With the publication of Deaths and Entrances in 1946, which contains some of his most celebrated poems, Thomas’s literary reputation grew considerably. The following year he received the Society of Authors' Travelling Scholarship and spent several months in northern Italy.

With the printing of Collected Poems in 1952 he became a major public figure on the basis of the book’s enthusiastic reception by reviewers and critics. His later poetry had begun to reveal the change in his attitude from one of doubt and fear to faith and hope, with love of God gained through love of humankind and the world of nature. It also was more accessible. It was at this time, however, that he became unbearably dissatisfied with life. Part of this feeling may have been due to his growing fear of alienation from his Irish-born wife, Caitlin, and their three children, Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm. Part of it may have been the effect of his fear of losing his powers. In addition, he was miserable as a public figure. He was anxious before strangers. Although he was deeply appreciated by the audiences he read to, most of these people were interested in the poet of public fame, not in the private man. For a man with a huge capacity and need to love and be loved, this experience may have been devastating. Whatever the causes, Thomas produced mostly fiction and verse plays the last few years of his life. Of these, the unfinished Adventures in the Skin Trade deals with his urban experiences, Under Milk Wood with his village reminiscences. Both of these works, along with his unfinished series of poems titled “In Country Heaven” (of which In Country Sleep, published in 1952, was a part), are celebrations of “the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”

The last several years of Thomas's life brought opportunities to travel abroad, first to the United States and Canada in 1950, to Persia (now Iran) in 1951, and again to the United States several times in 1952 and 1953. This active period was also marked by marital difficulties and affairs.

Since Thomas's untimely demise at the age of thirty-nine, collections of his screenplays, radio plays, correspondence, and notebooks, as well as poetry anthologies, have been published, some of which had not been released during his lifetime. Both the University of Wales and Swansea University have established prizes in his name to recognize the efforts of young, up-and-coming writers, and former US president Jimmy Carter founded the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in 1995.

Author Works

Poetry:

Eighteen Poems, 1934

Twenty-Five Poems, 1936

The Map of Love, 1939

The World I Breathe, 1939

New Poems, 1943

Deaths and Entrances, 1946

Twenty-Six Poems, 1950

In Country Sleep, and Other Poems, 1952

Collected Poems, 1934-1952, 1952

Dylan Thomas's Choice; An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas, 1963 (Ralph Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies, editors)

The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971 (Daniel Jones, editor)

Long Fiction:

The Death of the King’s Canary, 1976 (with John Davenport)

Short Fiction:

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, 1940

Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, 1946

A Child’s Christmas in Wales, 1954

Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories, 1955

A Prospect of the Sea, and Other Stories, 1955

Early Prose Writings, 1971

The Followers, 1976

The Collected Stories, 1984

Drama:

Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices, pr. 1953 (public reading), pr. 1954 (radio play), pb. 1954, pr. 1956 (staged musical settings by Daniel Jones)

Screenplays:

Three Weird Sisters, 1948 (with Louise Birt and David Evans)

No Room at the Inn, 1948 (with Ivan Foxwell)

The Doctor and the Devils, 1953

The Beach at Falesá, 1963

Twenty Years A’Growing, 1964

Rebecca’s Daughters, 1965

Me and My Bike, 1965

Dylan Thomas, the Complete Screenplays, 1995 (John Ackerman, editor)

Radio Plays:

Quite Early One Morning, 1944

The Londoner, 1946

Return Journey, 1947

Quite Early One Morning, 1954 (22 radio plays)

Nonfiction:

Letters to Vernon Watkins, 1957 (Vernon Watkins, editor)

Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, 1966 (Constantine FitzGibbon, editor)

Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, 1968 (Ralph Maud, editor)

Twelve More Letters by Dylan Thomas, 1969 (FitzGibbon, editor)

Living and Writing, 1972 (Christopher Copeman, editor)

The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas, 2001

Pearl of Great Price: The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin, 2014 (Jeff Towns, editor)

Miscellaneous:

Miscellany: Poems, Stories, Broadcasts, 1963

Miscellany Two: A Visit to Grandpa's, and Other Stories and Poems., 1966

“The Doctor and the Devils,” and Other Scripts, 1966 (two screenplays and one radio play)

Miscellany Three: Poems and Stories, 1978

Bibliography

Ackerman, John. Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A biography describing the life and writings of Thomas.

Ackerman, John. Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas’s Life, Writing, and His Wales. 2d ed. Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1998. This biography of Dylan looks at his homeland, Wales, and shows how the area influenced his writings.

Christie, William. Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Literary Lives. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=997845&site=ehost-live. Accessed 10 Apr. 2017. A biography of Thomas that seeks to appeal to both general audiences and scholars. Contains notes, bibliography, and index.

Davies, Walford. Dylan Thomas. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986. A biography and an introduction are followed by several chapters on the poems: poems on poetry, early poetry, comparisons of early and late poems, “Fern Hill,” and the last poems. The final chapter attempts to put Thomas’s work in context and to draw some conclusions regarding the poet in relationship to society, his style, and the way he uses language. Good notes contain bibliographical references.

Davies, Walford. A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. A valuable aid to understanding Thomas’s troubled life and enduring body of work. Begins with an insightful biography that provides a useful context for studying his writings. The second section provides a systematic overview of his works, while the third section summarizes the critical and scholarly response to his writings. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the most helpful general studies.

Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas: The Biography. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. This excellent biography contains material found in American archives and also those of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Ferris interviewed more than two hundred people who either knew Thomas or worked with him. He attempts to separate the facts from the legendary reputation of Thomas. This book elaborates on, and enhances, the “approved” biography by Constantine FitzGibbon (The Life of Dylan Thomas, 1965), the personal memoirs by Caitlin Thomas (Leftover Life to Kill, 1957), and John Malcolm Brinnin (Dylan Thomas in America, 1955).

Hardy, Barbara Nathan. Dylan Thomas: An Original Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Hardy looks at Thomas’s use of language in his writings, including his use of Welsh-derived terms. Includes bibliography and index.

Jones, R. F. G. Time Passes: Dylan Thomas’s Journey to “Under Milk Wood.” Sydney: Woodworm Press, 1994. An account of the literary development of Thomas, including analysis of Under Milk Wood. Includes bibliography and index.

Korg, Jacob. Dylan Thomas. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. A basic biography of Thomas that covers his life and works. Includes bibliography and index.

Lycett, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004. A major new Thomas biography, well-researched and acclaimed.

Parker, James. "The Last Rock-Star Poet." The Atlantic, vol. 314, no. 5, Dec. 2014, pp. 50–52. Literary Reference Center, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=99338289&site=lrc-live. Accessed 10 Apr. 2017. Critiques Thomas's poetic aesthetic. Discusses his rise to fame as well as the physical breakdown he experienced at the end of his life.

Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000. Sinclair provides the story of Thomas’s life as a poet and writer. Includes bibliography and index.