Dylan Thomas(1914–1953)

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive on the western edge of Swansea on the twenty-seventh of October 1914, second child of David John Thomas, English-language master at Swansea Grammar School, and Florence Williams, a Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire farmer's daughter. He was raised in the suburban Uplands district of Swansea in an English-speaking home but in a Welsh-speaking maternal extended family, the duality that became the central note of his work. He was schooled at his father's grammar from 1925, did badly in every subject except English, contributed verse to the school magazine from his fifteenth year, left school at sixteen without a leaving certificate, and worked from October 1931 in his seventeenth year as a junior reporter on the South Wales Daily Post in Swansea for fifteen months.

He published his first volume Eighteen Poems with the small London press Sunday Referee in December 1934 in his twenty-first year. The volume was the publishing event of the British poetry year. The early verse, intense, dense, allusive, sound-driven, was sharply distinct from the political and discursive registers of the W. H. Auden generation that had dominated the British poetry of the early 1930s, and Thomas was treated by the London poetry establishment from twenty-one onward as the most original new lyric voice in the language. Twenty-five Poems followed in 1936; the prose-and-verse collection The Map of Love appeared in 1939, and the autobiographical short-story collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog in 1940. He married Caitlin Macnamara in July 1937, settled briefly at Laugharne in Carmarthenshire on the south coast estuary of the Tâf, moved to London during the war years, returned to Wales in 1944, and in 1949 settled at the Boat House at Laugharne, the small bay-window house above the estuary in which he wrote the central body of his late work.

Through the war he worked as a scriptwriter for Strand Films on the Ministry of Information documentaries, and from 1945 was a regular BBC features broadcaster, the most distinctive and most paid voice on the BBC Third Programme through the late 1940s. The mature poetry was published in Deaths and Entrances (February 1946, the central volume of his career, with Fern Hill, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, Poem in October, and the ten Vision and Prayer sonnets) and the collected Selected Poems of 1952. The villanelle Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, addressed to his dying father, was written at Laugharne in 1951, first published in the Italian-American magazine Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and in his volume In Country Sleep later that year.

He made four American reading tours between 1950 and 1953, the lectures and public readings at universities and concert-halls across the United States that made him the leading English-language platform-reader of his generation and built the American academic reputation on which his later canonical status partly rests. The fourth tour, in October to November 1953, was undertaken in poor health; he was admitted to St Vincent's Hospital in New York on the fifth of November 1953 in a coma diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia and died there on the ninth of November 1953 in his thirty-ninth year. His body was returned to Wales and buried at St Martin's churchyard at Laugharne under a plain white cross. The verse-radio-drama Under Milk Wood, the small-town day-in-the-life of the fictional Llareggub on the south Welsh coast, the last full work he completed, was broadcast posthumously on the BBC Third Programme in January 1954 with Richard Burton as First Voice; it has been performed continuously on stage and radio ever since. The Boat House at Laugharne has been a public museum since 1979. The Thomas name in modern English-language verse carries the weight of the Swansea-born poet who fixed the lyric onto the late-Victorian-and-modernist edge.