DYLAN M. THOMAS, POETRY & WRITING FROM WALES

Today, The Grandma has been reading some poetry. She has chosen one of her favourite Welsh writers, Dylan Thomas, who died on a day like today in 1953.

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914-9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems Do not go gentle into that good night and And death shall have no dominion, as well as the play for voices Under Milk Wood. He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a roistering, drunken and doomed poet.

He was born in Uplands, Swansea, in 1914, leaving school in 1932 to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager.

In 1934, the publication of Light breaks where no sun shines caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara. They married in 1937 and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm.

He came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently featured by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene.

Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s. His readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in the United States cemented his legend, and he went on to record to vinyl such works as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November 1953, he was interred at St Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.

Although Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic, and ingenious use of words and imagery. His position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public.

More information: Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea the son of Florence Hannah (née Williams; 1882-1958), a seamstress, and David John 'Jack' Thomas (1876-1952), a teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906-1953), who was eight years his senior.

At the 1921 census, Nancy and Dylan are noted as speaking both Welsh and English. Their parents were also bilingual in English and Welsh, and Jack Thomas taught Welsh at evening classes. One of their Swansea relations has recalled that, at home, Both Auntie Florrie and Uncle Jack always spoke Welsh. There are three accounts from the 1940s of Dylan singing Welsh hymns and songs, and of speaking a little Welsh.

Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as son of the sea after Dylan ail Don, a character in The Mabinogion. His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced ˈ [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as the dull one. When he broadcast on Welsh BBC early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan /ˈdɪlən/.

The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth.

Thomas' childhood also featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire. In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem Fern Hill, but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches. Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones, at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm, where he spent his time riding Prince the cart horse, chasing pheasants and fishing for trout.

All these relatives were bilingual, and many worshipped at Smyrna chapel in Llangain where the services were always in Welsh, including Sunday School which Thomas sometimes attended. There is also an account of the young Thomas being taught how to swear in Welsh. His schoolboy friends recalled that It was all Welsh -and the children played in Welsh...he couldn't speak English when he stopped at Fernhill...in all his surroundings, everybody else spoke Welsh... At the 1921 census, 95% of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, 13% -more than 200 people- spoke only Welsh.

Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: And death shall have no dominion, Before I Knocked and The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. And death shall have no dominion appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933. When Light breaks where no sun shines appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender.

They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934. 18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years.The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin.

More information: Discover Dylan Thomas

In May 1934, Thomas made his first visit to Laugharne, the strangest town in Wales, as he described it in an extended letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, in which he also writes about the town's estuarine bleakness, and the dismal lives of the women cockle pickers working the shore around him.

In December 1935, Thomas contributed the poem The Hand That Signed the Paper to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse.

In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise.

Two years later, in 1938, Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. During this time Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.

By the late 1930s, Thomas was embraced as the poetic herald for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics. Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto. He later stated that he believed they were intellectual muckpots leaning on a theory. Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece, modelled their work on Thomas's.

In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of his holding close links with the communists; he was also decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist. He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against the British Union of Fascists. Bert Trick has provided an extensive account of an Oswald Mosley rally in the Plaza cinema in Swansea in July 1933 that he and Thomas attended.

More information: Poetry Foundation

In 1939, a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as The Map of Love. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary, though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.

American poet John Brinnin invited Thomas to New York, where in February 1950 they embarked on a lucrative three-month tour of arts centres and campuses. The tour, which began in front of an audience of a thousand at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Poetry Centre in New York, took in about 40 venues.

Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953 to undertake further performances of Under Milk Wood, organised by John Brinnin, his American agent and Director of the Poetry Centre.

Thomas died at noon on 9 November, having never recovered from his coma. A nurse, and the poet John Berryman, were present with him at the time of death.

More information: Poem Hunter

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes,
and before I could read them for myself,
I had come to love just the words of them,
the words alone.

Dylan Thomas