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Dylan Thomas

Barfoot, Rhian (2015). Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-sexual Servitude. Writing Wales in English. Cardiff: University of Wales press. ISBN 978-1-78316-184-3.

Goodby, John, ed. (2001). Dylan Thomas. New Casebooks. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-333-80395-0.

Goodby, John; Wigginton, Chris (2024). Dylan Thomas. Critical Lives. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781789149326.

Wartime, 1939–1945

In 1939, a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as The Map of Love. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary, though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.

Worried about conscription he unsuccessfully sought employment in a reserved occupation with the Ministry of Information. However, an "unreliable lung", as he described his chronic respiratory condition - coughing sometimes confined him to bed, and he had a history of bringing up blood and mucus - proved to be the grounds for the authorities to allocate him a C3 category medical exemption which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. He would subsequently be recognised as engaged in essential war work through his roles in broadcasting for the BBC and in film making.

In May 1941, Thomas and Caitlin left their son with his grandmother at Blashford and moved to London. The following September he began work for

In early 1943, Thomas began a relationship with Pamela Glendower, one of several affairs he had during his marriage. The affairs either ran out of steam or were halted after Caitlin discovered his infidelity. In March 1943, Caitlin gave birth to a daughter, Aeronwy, in London. They lived in a run-down studio in Chelsea, made up of a single large room with a curtain to separate the kitchen.

At the outset of the Second World War Thomas was continuing to struggle to support his family financially. He wrote begging letters to random literary figures asking for support, a plan he hoped would provide a long-term regular income.

In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was one of many streets that suffered badly; rows of shops, including the Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". Thomas later wrote a feature programme for the radio, Return Journey, which described the café as being "razed to the snow". The programme, produced by Philip Burton, was first broadcast on 15 June 1947. The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war.

Making films

In five film projects, between 1942 and 1945, the Ministry of Information (MOI) commissioned Thomas to script a series of documentaries about both urban planning and wartime patriotism, all in partnership with director John Eldridge: Wales: Green Mountain, Black Mountain, New Towns for Old, Fuel for Battle, Our Country and A City Reborn.

Thomas hoped to find employment in the film industry and wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of Information. 

After unsuccessful attempts to gain employment at the MOI and the BBC, Thomas found work with Strand Films, providing him with his first regular income since the South Wales Daily Post. Thomas scripted six films for Strand in 1942 to commissions from the MOI: This is Colour (on aniline dye processing), New Towns for Old, Balloon Site 568 (a recruitment film), CEMA (on arts organisation), Young Farmers and Battle for Freedom. He also scripted Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain, a British Council commission and a bi-lingual production. These Are The Men (1943) was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally. Conquest of a Germ (1944) explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis. Our Country (1945) was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry.

His screenplay for The Beach of Falesá, not produced as a film, received a BBC radio production in May 2014.

Escaping to Wales

The Thomas family also made several escapes back to Wales. Between 1941 and 1943, they lived intermittently in Plas Gelli, Talsarn, in Cardiganshire. Plas Gelli sits close by the River Aeron, after whom Aeronwy is thought to have been named. Some of Thomas's letters from Gelli can be found in his Collected Letters whilst an extended account of Thomas's time there can be found in D. N. Thomas's book, Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow (2000). The Thomases shared the mansion with his childhood friends from Swansea, Vera and Evelyn Phillips. Vera's friendship with the Thomases in nearby New Quay is portrayed in the 2008 film The Edge of Love.

In July 1944, with the threat in London of German flying bombs, Thomas moved to the family cottage at Blaencwm near Llangain, Carmarthenshire, where he resumed writing poetry, completing "Holy Spring" and "Vision and Prayer".

In September that year, the Thomas family moved to New Quay in Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), where they rented Majoda, a wood and asbestos bungalow on the cliffs overlooking Cardigan Bay. It was there that Thomas wrote a radio piece about New Quay, Quite Early One Morning, a sketch for his later work, Under Milk Wood. Of the poetry written at this time, of note is Fern Hill, started while living in New Quay, continued at Blaencwm in July and August 1945 and first published in October 1945

Thomas's nine months in New Quay, said first biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, were "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days…[with a] great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. His second biographer, Paul Ferris, agreed: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." Thomas's third biographer, George Tremlett, concurred, describing the time in New Quay as "one of the most creative periods of Thomas's life." Professor Walford Davies, who co-edited the 1995 definitive edition of the play, has noted that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood."

Wartime

At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was worried about conscription. He was unsuccessful in seeking employment in a reserved occupation with the Ministry of Information. However, an unreliable lung, as he described his chronic condition - coughing sometimes confined him to bed, and he had a history of bringing up blood and mucus.[108] - proved to be the grounds for the authorities to allocate him a C3 category medical exemption which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. He would subsequently be recognised as engaged in essential war work through his role in film making and broadcasting for the BBC,

Thomas’s horror of war, adumbrated in the poems of the 1930 and fuelled by his lived experience of the of bombing raids and fire storms of the Blitz in London, receive full expression in his poems of the war period. These include elegies for an elderly man - Among Those Killed in a Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred (1941) - and for child victims of incendiary bombing raids in Ceremony After a Fire Raid (1944) and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (1945). They were collected in Deaths and Entrances, the fourth volume of his poetry, published in 1946. The sentiments expressed in his war poems were, according to Professor Walford Davies, representative of “the real temper of the British people of the time - the resilience and the guts”.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas had first-hand experience of the blitz whilst working in London for Strand Films on morale-boosting documentary films for the Ministry of Information. His lived experience of bombing raids and fire storms were given powerful expression in poems he wrote at the time, notably elegies for an elderly man - Among Those Killed in a Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred (1941) and for child victims of incendiary bombing raids in Ceremony After a Fire Raid (1944) and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (1945). They were collected in Deaths and Entrances , a volume of his poetry published in 1946. The sentiments expressed in his war poems are, according to Professor Walford Davies, representative of “the real temper of the British people of the time - the resilience and the guts”.

Poetry

Poetic style and influences

Thomas's refusal to align with any literary group or movement has made him and his work difficult to categorise. Although influenced by the modern symbolism and surrealism movements he refused to follow such creeds. Instead, critics view Thomas as part of the modernism and romanticism movements. Elder Olson, in his 1954 critical study of Thomas's poetry, wrote of "[...] a further characteristic which distinguished Thomas's work from that of other poets. It was unclassifiable." Olson continued that in a postmodern age that continually attempted to demand that poetry have social reference, none could be found in Thomas's work, and that his work was so obscure that critics could not explicate it.

Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night". His images appear carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore, preaching, and Sigmund Freud. Explaining the source of his imagery, Thomas wrote in a letter to Glyn Jones: "My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I'm afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy".

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

From "In the white giant's thigh" (1950)

Distinguishing features of Thomas's early poetry include its verbal density, use of alliteration, sprung rhythm and internal rhyme, with some critics detecting the influence of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is attributed to Hopkins, who taught himself Welsh and who used sprung verse, bringing some features of Welsh poetic metre into his work. When Henry Treece wrote to Thomas comparing his style to that of Hopkins, Thomas wrote back denying any such influence. Thomas greatly admired Thomas Hardy, who is regarded as an influence. When Thomas travelled in America, he recited some of Hardy's work in his readings.

Other poets from whom critics believe Thomas drew influence include James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence. William York Tindall, in his 1962 study, A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas, finds comparison between Thomas's and Joyce's wordplay, while he notes the themes of rebirth and nature are common to the works of Lawrence and Thomas. Although Thomas described himself as the "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive", he stated that the phrase "Swansea's Rimbaud" was coined by poet Roy Campbell. Critics have explored the origins of Thomas's mythological pasts in his works such as "The Orchards", which Ann Elizabeth Mayer believes reflects the Welsh myths of the Mabinogion. Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in "Fern Hill", "In Country Sleep", "Ballad of the Long-legged Bait" and "In the White Giant's Thigh" from Under Milk Wood.

Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance… I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

Thomas became an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories. His first published prose work, After the Fair, appeared in The New English Weekly on 15 March 1934. Jacob Korg believes that one can classify Thomas's fiction work into two main bodies: vigorous fantasies in a poetic style and, after 1939, more straightforward narratives. Korg surmises that Thomas approached his prose writing as an alternate poetic form, which allowed him to produce complex, involuted narratives that do not allow the reader to rest.

Welsh poet

Thomas disliked being regarded as a provincial poet and decried any notion of 'Welshness' in his poetry. When he wrote to Stephen Spender in 1952, thanking him for a review of his Collected Poems, he added "Oh, & I forgot. I'm not influenced by Welsh bardic poetry. I can't read Welsh." Despite this his work was rooted in the geography of Wales. Thomas acknowledged that he returned to Wales when he had difficulty writing, and John Ackerman argues that "His inspiration and imagination were rooted in his Welsh background". Caitlin Thomas wrote that he worked "in a fanatically narrow groove, although there was nothing narrow about the depth and understanding of his feelings. The groove of direct hereditary descent in the land of his birth, which he never in thought, and hardly in body, moved out of."

Head of Programmes Wales at the BBC, Aneirin Talfan Davies, who commissioned several of Thomas's early radio talks, believed that the poet's "whole attitude is that of the medieval bards." Kenneth O. Morgan counter-argues that it is a 'difficult enterprise' to find traces of cynghanedd (consonant harmony) or cerdd dafod (tongue-craft) in Thomas's poetry. Instead he believes his work, especially his earlier more autobiographical poems, are rooted in a changing country which echoes the Welshness of the past and the Anglicisation of the new industrial nation: "rural and urban, chapel-going and profane, Welsh and English, Unforgiving and deeply compassionate." Fellow poet and critic Glyn Jones believed that any traces of cynghanedd in Thomas's work were accidental, although he felt Thomas consciously employed one element of Welsh metrics; that of counting syllables per line instead of feet. Constantine Fitzgibbon, who was his first in-depth biographer, wrote "No major English poet has ever been as Welsh as Dylan".

Although Thomas had a deep connection with Wales, he disliked Welsh nationalism. He once wrote, "Land of my fathers, and my fathers can keep it". While often attributed to Thomas himself, this line actually comes from the character Owen Morgan-Vaughan, in the screenplay Thomas wrote for the 1948 British melodrama The Three Weird Sisters. Robert Pocock, a friend from the BBC, recalled "I only once heard Dylan express an opinion on Welsh Nationalism. He used three words. Two of them were Welsh Nationalism." Although not expressed as strongly, Glyn Jones believed that he and Thomas's friendship cooled in the later years as he had not 'rejected enough' of the elements that Thomas disliked – "Welsh nationalism and a sort of hill farm morality". Apologetically, in a letter to Keidrych Rhys, editor of the literary magazine Wales, Thomas's father wrote that he was "afraid Dylan isn't much of a Welshman". Though FitzGibbon asserts that Thomas's negativity towards Welsh nationalism was fostered by his father's hostility towards the Welsh language.

Works cited

• Bold, Alan (1976). Cambridge Book of English Verse, 1939–1975. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-09840-3.
• Brinnin, J. (1955). Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal. New York: Avon.
• Davies, J. A. (2000). Dylan Thomas's Swansea, Gower and Laugharne. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1628-3.
• Davies, W.; Maud, R., eds. (1995). Under Milk Wood: the Definitive Edition. Everyman.
• Davies, Walford (2014). Dylan Thomas. Writers of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
• Ellis, Hannah, ed. (2014). Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration. London: Bloomsbury.
• Ferris, Paul, ed. (1985). Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters. London: J. M. Dent. ISBN 978-0-460-04635-0.
• Ferris, Paul (1989). Dylan Thomas: A Biography. New York: Paragon House. ISBN 978-1-55778-215-1.
• FitzGibbon, Constantine (1965). The Life of Dylan Thomas. J. M. Dent & Sons.
• Goodby, John (2013). The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall. Oxford: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-78138-937-9.
• Greenburg, L.; et al. (1962). "Report of an Air Pollution Incident in New York City, November 1953". Public Health Reports. 77 (1): 7–16. doi:10.2307/4591399. JSTOR 4591399. PMC 1914642. PMID 13901508.
• Janes, Hilly (2014). The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas. London: The Robson Press. ISBN 978-1-84954-688-1.
• Jones, Glyn (1968). The Dragon has Two Tongues. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.
• Korg, Jacob (1965). Dylan Thomas. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-1548-4.
• Lycett, Andrew (2004). Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Phoenix. ISBN 978-0-7538-1787-2.
• Maud, Ralph, ed. (1970). Dylan Thomas in Print: A Bibliographical History. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3201-7.
• Maud, Ralph, ed. (1991). On The Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1787-3.
• Nashold, J.; Tremlett, G. (1997). The Death of Dylan Thomas. Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85158-977-7.
• Olson, Elder (1954). The Poetry of Dylan Thomas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-62916-2.
• Read, Bill (1964). The Days of Dylan Thomas. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
• Sinclair, Andrew (2003). Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas. London: Constable and Robinson. ISBN 978-1-84119-741-8.
• Thomas, Aeronwy (2009). My Father's Places: A Portrait of Childhood by Dylan Thomas' Daughter. London: Constable. ISBN 978-1-84901-005-4.
• Thomas, Caitlin (1957). Leftover Life to Kill. London: Putnam.
• Thomas, Caitlin; Tremlett, George (1986). Caitlin: A Warring Absence. London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 978-0-436-51850-8.
• Thomas, Caitlin (1997). My Life with Dylan Thomas, Double Drink Story. London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-87378-4.
• Thomas, David N. (2000). Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 978-1-85411-275-0.
• Thomas, David N., ed. (2003). Dylan Remembered 1914-1934. Vol. 1. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 978-1-85411-342-9.
• Thomas, David N., ed. (2004). Dylan Remembered 1935-1953. Vol. 2. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 978-1-85411-362-7.
• Thomas, David N.; Barton, Simon (2004). "Death by Neglect". In Thomas, David N. (ed.). Dylan Remembered 1935-1953. Vol. 2. Bridgend: Seren.
• Thomas, David N. (2008). Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?. Seren. ISBN 978-1-85411-480-8.
• Thomas, David N. (n.d.). "Dylan Thomas and the Edge of Love: The Real Story".
• Tindall, William York (1996). A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas. New York: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-0401-3.
• Tremlett, George (1991). Dylan Thomas: In the Mercy of His Means. London: Constable. ISBN 978-0-09-472180-7.