Dylan Thomas
He named a Welsh village after a rude phrase spelled backwards, and he's on the Sgt. Pepper cover. Dylan Thomas packed a lot into 39 years.
Published
Quick Facts
- Born
- 27 October 1914, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands, Swansea
- Died
- 9 November 1953, New York, aged 39
- Famous for
- Under Milk Wood, Fern Hill, A Child's Christmas in Wales and Do not go gentle into that good night
- First job
- Junior reporter at the South Wales Evening Post, aged 16
- Name
- Dylan comes from a figure in the Mabinogion; his middle name was Marlais
- Married
- Caitlin Macnamara, 1937; three children, Llewelyn, Aeronwy and Colm
- Writing home
- The Boathouse at Laugharne, with a garden shed as his workroom
- Resting place
- St Martin's churchyard, Laugharne
The boy who wrote poems in the back of a school book
Dylan Thomas grew up in a semi-detached house in Swansea's Uplands. His father taught English at the grammar school, and the boy absorbed words early. He took his first name from the Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh tales, and it was unusual enough that he had to teach people to say it: Dull-an. He left school at 16 to work as a reporter on the South Wales Evening Post, but he didn't stay long. By then he was filling notebooks with poems, many of which turned up later in his first book, 18 Poems, in 1934. Swansea never left his writing. He called it an "ugly, lovely town", and the park behind his childhood home, Cwmdonkin Park, appears in his poem The Hunchback in the Park.
Why Llareggub is a joke you have to read backwards
Under Milk Wood is Thomas's best-loved work. It follows one spring day in a fictional Welsh seaside town, from the sleeping dreams of the villagers to the last lights going out. He called it a "play for voices". The town is called Llareggub. It sounds like Welsh, but read it backwards and you get a two-word insult. Thomas delighted in it. People in Laugharne and New Quay, both places he lived, have long claimed to be the model. The truth is that the town is a blend of Welsh villages and Thomas's imagination. He gave a first public reading in New York in May 1953, with a cast that included himself. The BBC broadcast the play in January 1954, after his death, with Richard Burton as First Voice. It won the Prix Italia that year.
A poem for a dying father
Do not go gentle into that good night is one of the most quoted poems in English. Thomas wrote it for his father, D. J. Thomas, whose health was failing. It was published in 1951, and his father died the following year. The poem is a villanelle, a strict form with repeated lines, and Thomas bends it to a plea. The man who had taught him to love English was losing his sight and strength, and the poem asks him to fight on. Fern Hill, written in the 1940s, is the other great favourite. It looks back at boyhood summers on his aunt's farm in Carmarthenshire, and it is full of sunlit green and gold.
The man who made poetry a performance
Thomas had a rich, rolling voice, and audiences loved it. His American reading tours made him a star on a scale few poets enjoy. In 1952 he recorded A Child's Christmas in Wales for Caedmon Records, one of the first spoken-word LPs to find a big audience, and it is still read and heard every December. He was also a brilliant broadcaster and wrote for the BBC through the 1940s. Radio shaped his late style, which is why Under Milk Wood works so well when it is heard rather than read. His drinking became as famous as his work. He collapsed in New York in November 1953 and died at St Vincent's Hospital a few days later. The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village still trades on being his local.
A shed with a view in Laugharne
From 1949 Thomas lived with Caitlin and their children at the Boathouse in Laugharne, on the Taf estuary in Carmarthenshire. He wrote in a small shed on the cliff above, looking over the water. The shed has been kept as a writer's workroom, with screwed-up paper scattered about, and the Boathouse is now a museum. He is buried in the churchyard of St Martin's, under a plain white wooden cross. Caitlin was later buried beside him. He is remembered across Wales. Swansea has the Dylan Thomas Centre, and his childhood home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive has been restored to look as it did when he was born. The Dylan Thomas Prize rewards young writers, and a memorial stone to him sits in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. He also appears on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, among the faces in the crowd.
Notable people
- Dylan Thomas
- Caitlin Thomas
- D. J. Thomas
- Richard Burton
- Florence Thomas
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