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Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914-1953)

Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright. Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914, the son of a teacher. After he left grammar school in 1931, he worked as a reporter on the South Wales Evening Post, and pursued a keen interest in amateur dramatics. In 1934 he moved to London where his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems, was published the same year. The volume won him great acclaim, notably from Dame Edith Sitwell. This early collection demonstrates Thomas's commitment to a poetry of vivid, visceral language, in which the emotional effect of words' sounds are as important as their literal sense. In "Especially When the October Wind" he compares the poetic process to the violent, primal rhythms of nature: "My busy heart who shudders as she talks / Sheds syllabic blood and drains her words." Thematically, these poems establish Thomas's lifelong themes of sex, death, religion, and redemption, but seem obscure because they contain elements of surrealism and personal fantasy. Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937, a relationship that, as time went on, would become increasingly tempestuous. Rejected for military service in World War II, Thomas scripted several documentary films for the Ministry of Information. He also wrote several screenplays, most of which were never produced. Because of censorship problems, The Doctor and the Devils (written in 1944) was not filmed until 1986. Several of the poems of Deaths and Entrances (1946) draw on Thomas's wartime experiences, making him Britain's first civilian war poet. "Ceremony after a Fire Raid" focuses on the incineration of a child during a V-2 rocket attack. Its repetitions, biblical references, and lines of variable length give the poem a strongly liturgical quality: Forgive Us forgive Give Us your death that myselves the believers May hold it in a great flood Till the blood shall spurt, And the dust shall sing like a bird And the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heat. Less introspective than the early poems, this collection and In Country Sleep (1951) 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. His short stories, collected in 1983, are richly comic evocations of the Wales of his childhood. "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (1945) is a typically nostalgic example.

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 radio broadcast; it was still unfinished when Thomas took part in its first public performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1953. The work became his most famous piece. A warm, compassionate comedy, it evokes the lives of the inhabitants of Llareggub ("Buggerall" spelt backwards), a small, Welsh seaside town. Noted for his readings of his own verse, Thomas became legendary in the United States, where-despite his deteriorating health-he gave many lecture tours and gained a wide following. Nevertheless, his last years were shadowed by an increasing restlessness and his difficult relationship with his wife Caitlin. His celebrity status made a cult of his wild, drunken eccentricities: he once claimed to have drunk 40 pints of beer in an evening, and he habitually ate a pound of liquorice allsorts in his nightly bath. An operatic collaboration with Igor Stravinsky was planned, but frustrated by his death in New York on November 9, 1953, which was brought on by alcoholism and an overdose of prescribed drugs.