Dylan Thomas

Biography of Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)

Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty.

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914. After grammar school he moved to London where, in 1934, his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems, was published. At this early age, he revealed unusual power in the use of poetic diction and imagery; the volume won him immediate critical acclaim. Thematically, these poems and virtually all that followed seem obscure because they contain elements of surrealism and personal fantasy. But the freshness and vitality of Thomas’s language draw the reader into the poems and reveal the universality of the experiences with which they are concerned. This introspective tendency is less apparent in Deaths and Entrances (1946) and In Country Sleep (1951), which are generally regarded as containing his finest writing. Thomas’s other works include Twenty-five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939), containing both poetry and prose. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) is a group of autobiographical sketches, and Adventures in the Skin Trade (published posthumously, 1954) contains an unfinished novel and other prose pieces. During World War II (1939-1945) Thomas wrote scripts for documentary motion pictures.

After the war Thomas was a literary commentator for BBC radio. Under Milk Wood (published posthumously, 1954), a play for voices, was originally written for radiobroadcast; when Thomas read it for its first public performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1953, it was still unfinished. The work became his most famous piece; it evokes the lives of the inhabitants of Llareggub, a small, Welsh seaside town. Noted for his readings of his own verse, Thomas became legendary in the United States, where he gave many lecture tours and gained a wide following. Nevertheless, his last years were shadowed by an increasingly tragic view of his own tempestuous life. His death in New York City on November 9, 1953, was brought on by alcoholism.

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Poems By Dylan Thomas

Miscellaneous

A Child’s Christmas In Wales (No Comments »)
A Letter To My Aunt (No Comments »)
A Process In The Weather Of The Heart (No Comments »)
A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London (No Comments »)
All All And All The Dry Worlds Lever (No Comments »)
All That I Owe The Fellows Of The Grave (No Comments »)
Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred (No Comments »)
Author’s Prologue (No Comments »)
Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait (No Comments »)
Before I Knocked (No Comments »)
Clown In The Moon (No Comments »)
Deaths And Entrances (No Comments »)
Ears In The Turrets Hear (No Comments »)
Elegy (No Comments »)
Especially When The October Wind (No Comments »)
Foster The Light (No Comments »)
From Love’s First Fever To Her Plague (No Comments »)
Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes In The Cuckoo’s Month (No Comments »)
Holy Spring (No Comments »)
How Shall My Animal (No Comments »)
I Dreamed My Genesis (No Comments »)
I Fellowed Sleep (No Comments »)
I Have Longed To Move Away (No Comments »)
I See The Boys Of Summer (No Comments »)
I, In My Intricate Image (No Comments »)
In The Beginning (No Comments »)
Incarnate Devil (No Comments »)
January 1939 (No Comments »)
Lament (No Comments »)
Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed (No Comments »)
Love In The Asylum (No Comments »)
My Hero Bares His Nerves (No Comments »)
My World Is Pyramid (No Comments »)
Not From This Anger (No Comments »)
Now (No Comments »)
O Make Me A Mask (No Comments »)
On A Wedding Anniversary (No Comments »)
On No Work Of Words (No Comments »)
Once It Was The Colour Of Saying (No Comments »)
Poem In October (No Comments »)
Poem On His Birthday (No Comments »)
Should Lanterns Shine (No Comments »)
Sometimes The Sky’s Too Bright (No Comments »)
The Conversation Of Prayer (No Comments »)
The Hand That Signed The Paper (No Comments »)
The Seed-At-Zero (No Comments »)
Then Was My Neophyte (No Comments »)
There Was A Saviour (No Comments »)
This Side Of The Truth (No Comments »)
To-Day, This Insect (No Comments »)
Twenty-Four Years (No Comments »)
Vision and Prayer [I] (No Comments »)
Was There A Time (No Comments »)
When All My Five And Country Senses See (No Comments »)
When Once The Twilight Locks No Longer (No Comments »)
When, Like A Running Grave (No Comments »)
Where Once The Waters Of Your Face (No Comments »)

18 Poems

If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love (No Comments »)
Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines (No Comments »)
Our Eunuch Dreams (No Comments »)
The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower (No Comments »)

25 Poems

And Death Shall Have No Dominion (No Comments »)

Country Sleep

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (No Comments »)

Deaths and Entrances

Fern Hill (No Comments »)
In My Craft Or Sullen Art (No Comments »)