Dylan Thomas Biography and List of Works

Welsh poet and prose writer whose works are known for the musical quality of the language, comic or visionary scenes and sensual images. Thomas was a heavy drinker, and he died in the United States on a tour on November 9, 1953. Thomas's death resulted mainly from his alcoholism, but it achieved international fame and was taken as symbolic of the plight of the artist in modern society.

"The hand that signet the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death."
(from 'The Hand That Signed the Paper', 1936)

Dylan Thomas was born in the seaport town Swansea, West Glamorgan. His father was the senior English master at Swansea Grammar School, where Thomas was educated. His parents had a Welsh-speaking country background from Carmarthhenshire, but they adopted English language and culture. Although Thomas could not read Welsh, he picked up the rhythms of the language, and started to write poetry while still at school.

Thomas received little formal education. He edited the school magazine and left his studies at the age of 16 and worked for years as a trainee newspaper reporter on the South Wales Evening Post. His first book, subjective and sensuous 18 POEMS, appeared in 1934. It was followed by TWENTY-FIVE POEMS (1936), which established his reputation as a poet. In 1937 he moved to London and married Caitlin Macnamara - they settled for a while at Laugharne in Wales, returning there permanently after many wanderings in 1949. The marriage was stormy; Thomas's earnings were irregular, he had to borrow money from his friends, whom he treated badly in return.

By the end of the 1930s Thomas had gained fame in literary circles. He later became a highly public figure due to his radio work and readings. His romantic, rhetorical style won a large following. Although Thomas' poems appear freely flowing and visionary, his work sheets reveal him as an impassioned, even obsess ional, craftsman.

During World War II Thomas worked sporadically for the BBC, where his melodic voice made him a great favourite. In the 1940s Thomas wrote some of his best works. PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG (1940) is a collection of largely autobiographical short stories, paying homage to James Joyce. DEATHS AND ENTRANCES (1946) uses religious imagery and takes as its subject the bombing of London during WW II, or the loss of childhood world as in the poem 'Fern Hill'. Another pastoral ode, 'Poems in October,' expresses Thomas's nostalgia for lost youth.

In 1947 Thomas suffered a mental breakdown, and he moved to Oxford. He returned to Wales in 1949 and made his first American tour the following year, mostly because of financial pressures. In 1950, 1952, and 1953 Thomas continued his popular reading tours on American college campuses.

His last four years Thomas spent at the Boat House in Laugharne, where he was buried. Shortly before his death in New York Thomas took part in a reading of what was to be his most famous single work, UNDER MILK WOOD (1954), a return to the Welsh landscape, and a celebration of the domestic life and dreams of ordinary people. It was published posthumously as his reminiscences A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (1955). His NOTEBOOKS appeared in 1968. A new edition of THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS (1971) included personal comments by his friend and early collaborator, the composer Daniel Jones.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames
After the first death, there is no other.
(from 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death...')

Thomas's poetry is marked by vivid metaphors, the use of Christian and Freudian imagery, and celebration of the wonder of growth and death. Among his best-known individual poems are 'And death shall have no dominion,' 'Altarwise by owllight' (a sonnet sequence), 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,' 'Do not go gentle into that good night,' 'In My Craft and Sullen Art,' and 'Fern Hill.'

(from FERN HILL)

...
nothing I cared, in the lambwhite days, that time would take me
up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
in the moon that is always rising,
nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
and wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
time held me green and dying
though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Thomas also wrote short stories, essays, and a roman à clef, ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE (1955), which was left unfinished. Thomas's radio play UNDER THE MILK WOOD (1953) portrays a small Welsh coastal town and was made into a film in 1971 starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. His film scripts concerned less personal subjects: THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS (1953) is set in late eighteenth century Edinburgh, and is based on the lives of the infamous grave robbers and murderers Burke and Hare. In the story a surgeon starts to pay for bodies, which he uses as cadavers for dissection. The screenplay examines the theme of 'the ends justify the means'. The trial touched the foundations of the whole society: "SECOND PROFESSOR: ... and if a member of the royal family is accused of a commoner's crime, then it is the whole family that is accused. An elaborate smile - but you see my point?"

For further reading: Dylan Thomas: "Dog among the Fairies" by H. Treece (1949); The Poetry of Dylan Thomas by E. Olson (1954); Dylan Thomas by D. Stanford (1954); Dylan Thomas in America by J.M. Brinnin (1955); A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas by W.Y. Tindall (1962)(1962); The Life of Dylan Thomas by C. FitzGibbon (1965); Saga of Prayer by R.K. Burdette (1972); Dylan Thomas by P. Ferris (1977); The Oxford Companion to Literature of Wales by Meic Stephens (1986); Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work by J. Ackerman (1996) - See also: Amos Tutuola, whose novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard required the support of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas to secure its publication in Britain - Other Welsh writers: Kate Roberts, Gwyn Thomas, Christopher Meredith, R.S. Thomas

18 POEMS, (1934)