Dylan Thomas
Who Made Rage Keep To A Form · Poet · 1914–1953
The Swansea poet who wrote most of his best work in his teens, read to packed American halls, and was dead at thirty-nine.
Who was Thomas?
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914, the son of a grammar-school English master who had wanted to be a poet and read him Shakespeare before he could read it himself. He left school at sixteen, worked briefly as a reporter on the South Wales Daily Post, and filled a set of notebooks in his teens from which he quarried for the rest of his life — a fact worth knowing, because the image of him as a purely spontaneous talent is the opposite of the truth: he revised obsessively, sometimes through a hundred drafts. Eighteen Poems appeared in 1934, when he was twenty. He wrote for radio and for film, and made four reading tours of America between 1950 and 1953, where his voice made him famous in a way his printed work never had. Do not go gentle into that good night was written about his father's decline: nineteen lines in the villanelle form, in which two lines return alternately through the poem and then arrive together in the final couplet, so that the same demand is made six times, each time in different company. His father had been an angry, unbelieving man all his life and was going blind and losing his voice. Thomas drank heavily, borrowed from everybody and was ashamed of it, and died in New York in November 1953, aged thirty-nine.
Major achievements
- Do not go gentle into that good night, one of the great villanelles in English
- Eighteen Poems (1934), written largely in his teens
- Under Milk Wood, a play for voices
- A Child's Christmas in Wales
- Made poetry an event people bought tickets for
Life in brief
- 1914 — Born in Swansea: Son of the grammar school's English master.
- 1930 — The notebooks: Fills them in his teens and quarries them for life.
- 1931 — Reporter: Briefly on the South Wales Daily Post.
- 1934 — Eighteen Poems: Published at twenty.
- 1937 — Marries Caitlin Macnamara: Devoted and destructive in equal measure.
- 1949 — The Boathouse at Laugharne: Writing in a shed above the estuary.
- 1951 — Do not go gentle: A villanelle written about his father's decline.
- 1953 — Dies in New York: On the fourth American tour, aged thirty-nine.
Explore the life of Thomas — five chapters
- The Notebooks — Almost everything, drafted before twenty
- Eighteen Poems, at Twenty — London, notoriety, and Caitlin
- The Voice — Radio, America, and poetry as an event
- Nineteen Lines With Almost No Room In Them — Do not go gentle, and a father losing his voice
- The Chelsea Hotel — November 1953
Read the five-chapter life of Dylan Thomas →
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- Explore the life of Thomas — five chapters
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