Dylan Thomas
(1914–1953)

When Dylan Thomas burst upon the literary scene in 1933, he was barely 20 years old. His poems, romantic, effusive, and melodic, spoke to readers then, as now, in a voice that could be mistaken for no one else's. Despite some critical bewilderment at first, Thomas gained remarkable popularity in his lifetime, probably greater than that of any poet since Byron. The rich, glowing magic of his language propels the reader onward in spite of its own complex imagery, visionary landscapes, and puzzling ambiguities. Stephan Spender called Thomas "a linguistic genius." The critic Louis Untermeyer says that his lines "leap and shout and all but leave the printed page…."

Thomas was born in Swansea, an industrial city on the southern coast of Wales. His father was a schoolteacher, and young Dylan, surrounded by his father's books, seems to have spent his childhood in training to be a poet. He attended Swansea Grammar School until 1931, after which he worked intermittently as a newspaper reporter, radio broadcaster, and film scriptwriter. In 1941, he published a collection of stories about his childhood and youth, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He recorded a number of his poems, as well as his "play for voices," Under Milk Wood, which premiered in May 1953 at the Fogg Theater in Harvard University, with Thomas reading all the parts.

Thomas did his best work while he was living in Wales, far from the temptations of London and New York. At work he was a meticulous craftsman, shy when sober, exercising strict control over what on paper seems so spontaneous. But in London, and on his four speaking tours to the United States, he was a different man, flamboyant, childish, hard-drinking, dissolute, an "outlaw defiant." His marriage to the Irish beauty Caitlin Macnamara was stormy but enduring. She was at his side when he died from the affects of alcoholism at St. Vincent Hospital in New York City.

Poetry, to Thomas, was "the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision." That vision is almost always free of the political themes and overtones found in the works of such contemporaries as Auden and Spender. On the Thomas's place in literary history, the verdict is mixed. The poet Conrad Aiken sums him up as a "language-lover and language-juggler." The critic David Daiches says that "he was growing in poetic stature to the last" but, more important, "he wrote some poems that the world will not willingly let die."

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