Thomas, Dylan Marlais

Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914-1953), Welsh poet, short story writer, and playwright. Born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914, Thomas was the son of a teacher. In 1931, after grammar school, he became a local newspaper reporter. During 1934 and 1935, and intermittently thereafter, he lived in London, where 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936) made his reputation. The Map of Love (1939), a collection of short stories and poems, was followed by The World I Breathe (United States, 1939), and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), a short story sequence.

Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937 and the couple had three children; their relationship was often tempestuous. During World War II, after he had been rejected for military service on health grounds, Thomas worked in London scripting propaganda films. Two later screenplays, The Doctor and the Devils and Rebecca’s Daughters, were filmed in 1986 and 1992. He also had a fine speaking voice and was a frequent broadcaster. In 1946 he published Deaths and Entrances, then In Country Sleep and Other Poems (United States, 1952). His Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952; United States 1953) was acclaimed and followed by Under Milk Wood (1954), his unfinished play for radio, first performed in New York in 1953.

From 1949 he lived at the Boat House in Laugharne (pronounced “Larn”), Carmarthenshire, a small Welsh seaside town, and made three successful reading tours to the United States that became legendary for his heavy drinking, wild behaviour, and financial fecklessness. In poor health and with his marriage in crisis, in October 1953 he began a fourth tour and planned an operatic collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. He died in New York on November 9, 1953 from the effects of alcohol and incorrect medication.

Thomas’s poems often draw on notebook drafts written in his teens. The difficult early poetry has Modernist elements, offers a neo-romantic contrast to the period’s social poetry, and at the same time has social content. His subjects include: “process” (bodily processes mirroring external natural forces); self and a repressive, particularly sexually repressive, suburban world; writing; relations with his father; and the Great War. Some regard him as a religious poet and certainly Biblical rhythms and imagery are often prominent. Conventional Christian belief is, however, at times countered by pantheistic tendencies and bleakly secular moments in his later poetry.

The tension between the thrusting energy of his poems and their strict forms in itself dramatizes the repression of the self by an essentially bourgeois world. Lines from “The force that through the green fuse”, an early “process” poem, bring together self and world, the presence of a superior inaccessible power that might be God or Nature, and dynamic, allusive, neo-Biblical language controlled by a strict syllabic count and consonantal rhymes:

The poems and neo-surrealistic fiction of The Map of Love (1939) reflect the troubled 1930s—European Fascism, annexations and invasions, and the Spanish Civil War—and sound a recurring apocalyptic note. Some poems explore familial relations. Public and private combine in “After the Funeral”, on an aunt’s death, and “A saint about to fall”, on his son’s imminent birth into a violent world.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog marks a sea change to realist, often humorous stories comprising a “provincial autobiography”, while still suggesting the wider, darkening world. Thomas also began Adventures in the Skin Trade, an unfinished tale of a naive provincial in London. Deaths and Entrances (1946) contains more immediately approachable poetry, exploring personal relationships, a civilian’s experience of the London Blitz, and the act of writing. In this volume attempts at affirmation conflict with underlying uncertainty. The volume ends with “Fern Hill”, carefree childhood viewed by an adult conscious of Time’s tyranny and memory’s uncertainty. The well-known conclusion is typically complex:

After 1946 Thomas completed few poems, some of which were haunted by post-Hiroshima foreboding. For his dying father he wrote the famous “Do not go gentle into that good night”.

Under Milk Wood, a warm comedy about the imaginary Welsh seaside town of Llareggub (“buggerall” spelt backwards), is his most popular work. Also well known is the nostalgic “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1945). His letters are often brilliantly comic. As a lyric poet of originality and often startling beauty, he has been hugely influential, as Philip Larkin recognized when linking him with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden: three poets “who’ve altered the face of poetry”. He is still widely read. Dylan Thomas was a driven, troubled man, but for many he has achieved iconic status as the archetypal convention-flouting bohemian writer.