Dylan thomas biography bbc winston

Welsh poet and writer (–)

For other uses, see Dylan Thomas (disambiguation).

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October &#;– 9 November ) was a Welsh poet and writer, whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood.

He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime; and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City.^[2] By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".^[3]

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, in , leaving school in to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post.

Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager. In , the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines" caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara; they married in and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm.

He came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer difficult.

He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently featured by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene. Thomas first travelled to the United States in the s; his readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened.

During his fourth trip to New York in , Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November, and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November, he was interred at St.&#;Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.

Appraisals of Thomas’s work have noted his original, rhythmic, and ingenious use of words and imagery.^[4][6] Further appraisals following on from new critical editions of his poems,^[7] have sought to explore in more depth his unique modernist poetic, setting aside the distracting legend of the "doomed poet", and seeking thereby to secure his status as a major poet of the 20th century.^[8]

Life and career

Early life

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October ^{[nb 1]} in Swansea, the son of Florence Hannah (née Williams; –), a seamstress, and David John 'Jack' Thomas (–), a teacher.

His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school.

Dylan thomas short biography Tremlett, George By the end of the month, over New Yorkers had died from the smog. Those that have championed his work have found the criticism baffling. John Ackerman.

Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (–), who was eight years his senior.^[10]

At the census, Nancy and Dylan are noted as speaking both Welsh and English.^[11] Their parents were also bilingual in English and Welsh, and Jack Thomas taught Welsh at evening classes. One of their Swansea relations has recalled that, at home, "Both Auntie Florrie and Uncle Jack always spoke Welsh."^[13] There are three accounts from the s of Dylan singing Welsh hymns and songs, and of speaking a little Welsh.

Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as "son of the sea" after Dylan ail Don, a character in The Mabinogion.

His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.^[10] Dylan, pronounced ˈ [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as the "dull one". When he broadcast on Welsh BBC early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation.

Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan .^[10][18]

The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands),^[19] in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth.

Childhood

Thomas has written a number of accounts of his childhood growing up in Swansea,^{[nb 2]} and there are also accounts available by those who knew him as a young child.

Thomas wrote several poems about his childhood and early teenage years, including "Once it was the colour of saying" and "The hunchback in the park", as well as short stories such as The Fight and A Child's Christmas in Wales.^[21]

Thomas's four grandparents played no part in his childhood.^{[nb 3]} For the first ten years or so of his life, Thomas's Swansea aunts and uncles helped with his upbringing.

These were his mother's three siblings, Polly and Bob, who lived in the St Thomas district of Swansea^[22] and Theodosia, and her husband, the Rev. David Rees, in Newton, Swansea, where parishioners recall Thomas sometimes staying for a month or so at a time.^{[nb 4]} All four aunts and uncles spoke Welsh and English.^[11]

Thomas's childhood also featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire.^[23] In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them.^{[nb 5]} The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the lyrical poem "Fern Hill",^[24] but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches.^{[nb 6]} Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones,^[25] at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm, where he spent his time riding Prince the cart horse, chasing pheasants and fishing for trout.^[26]

All these relatives were bilingual,^[11] and many worshipped at Smyrna chapel in Llangain where the services were always in Welsh, including Sunday School which Thomas sometimes attended.^[27] There is also an account of the young Thomas being taught how to swear in Welsh.

His schoolboy friends recalled that "It was all Welsh—and the children played in Welshhe couldn't speak English when he stopped at Fernhillin all his surroundings, everybody else spoke Welsh"^[29] At the census, 95% of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, 13%—more than people—spoke only Welsh.^[30]

A few fields south of Fernhill lay Blaencwm,^{[nb 7]} a pair of stone cottages to which his mother's Swansea siblings had retired,^[31] and with whom the young Thomas and his sister, Nancy, would sometimes stay.^[32] A couple of miles down the road from Blaencwm is the village of Llansteffan, where Thomas used to holiday at Rose Cottage with another Welsh-speaking aunt, Anne Williams, his mother's half-sister^[33] who had married into local gentry.^[34] Anne's daughter, Doris, married a dentist, Randy Fulleylove.

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The young Dylan also holidayed with them in Abergavenny, where Fulleylove had his practice.^[35]

Thomas's paternal grandparents, Anne and Evan Thomas, lived at The Poplars in Johnstown, just outside Carmarthen. Anne was the daughter of William Lewis, a gardener in the town. She had been born and brought up in Llangadog,^[36] as had her father, who is thought to be "Grandpa" in Thomas's short story A Visit to Grandpa's, in which Grandpa expresses his determination to be buried not in Llansteffan but in Llangadog.^[37]

Evan worked on the railways and was known as Thomas the Guard.

His family had originated in another part of Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire, in the farms that lay around the villages of Brechfa, Abergorlech, Gwernogle and Llanybydder, and which the young Thomas occasionally visited with his father. His father's side of the family also provided the young Thomas with another kind of experience; many lived in the towns of the South Wales industrial belt, including Port Talbot,^[40]Pontarddulais^[41] and Cross Hands.

Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with these throughout his life.

He was indulged by his mother, Florence, and enjoyed being mollycoddled, a trait he carried into adulthood, becoming skilled in gaining attention and sympathy. But Florence would have known that child deaths had been a recurring event in the family's history,^[44] and it is said that she herself had lost a child soon after her marriage.

But if Thomas was protected and spoiled at home, the real spoilers were his many aunts and older cousins, those in both Swansea and the Llansteffan countryside.^[46] Some of them played an important part in both his upbringing and his later life, as Thomas's wife, Caitlin, has observed: "He couldn't stand their company for more than five minutes Yet Dylan couldn't break away from them, either.

They were the background from which he had sprung, and he needed that background all his life, like a tree needs roots.".

Education

Thomas's formal education began at Mrs Hole's dame school, a private school on Mirador Crescent, a few streets away from his home.^[48] He described his experience there in Reminiscences of Childhood:

Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime&#;– the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.^[49]

Alongside dame school, Thomas also took private lessons from Gwen James, an elocution teacher who had studied at drama school in London, winning several major prizes.

She also taught "Dramatic Art" and "Voice Production", and would often help cast members of the Swansea Little Theatre (see below) with the parts they were playing.^[50] Thomas's parents' storytelling and dramatic talents, as well as their theatre-going interests, could also have contributed to the young Thomas's interest in performance.

In October , Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant, where his father taught English.

There are several accounts by his teachers and fellow pupils of Thomas's time at grammar school. He was an undistinguished pupil who shied away from school, preferring reading and drama activities. In his first year one of his poems was published in the school's magazine, and before he left he became its editor. Thomas's various contributions to the school magazine can be found here:^[55]

During his final school years he began writing poetry in notebooks; the first poem, dated 27 April (), is entitled "Osiris, come to Isis".

In June , Thomas won the school's mile race, held at St. Helen's Ground; he carried a newspaper photograph of his victory with him until his death.^[57][58]

In , when he was 16, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, where he remained for some 18 months.^[59] After leaving the newspaper, Thomas continued to work as a freelance journalist for several years, during which time he remained at Cwmdonkin Drive and continued to add to his notebooks, amassing poems in four books between and Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these years.^[10]

On the stage

The stage was also an important part of Thomas's life from to , as an actor, writer, producer and set painter.

He took part in productions at Swansea Grammar School, and with the YMCA Junior Players and the Little Theatre, which was based in the Mumbles. It was also a touring company that took part in drama competitions and festivals around South Wales.^[60] Between October and March , for example, Thomas and his fellow actors took part in five productions at the Mumbles theatre, as well as nine touring performances.

Thomas continued with acting and production throughout his life, including his time in Laugharne, South Leigh and London (in the theatre and on radio), as well as taking part in nine stage readings of Under Milk Wood.^[62] The Shakespearian actor, John Laurie, who had worked with Thomas on both the stage^[63] and radio^[64] thought that Thomas would "have loved to have been an actor" and, had he chosen to do so, would have been "Our first real poet-dramatist since Shakespeare."

Painting the sets at the Little Theatre was just one aspect of the young Thomas's interest in art.

His own drawings and paintings hung in his bedroom in Cwmdonkin Drive, and his early letters reveal a broader interest in art and art theory.^[66] Thomas saw writing a poem as an act of construction "as a sculptor works at stone,"^[67] later advising a student "to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stonehew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them" Throughout his life, his friends included artists, both in Swansea^[69] and in London,^[70] as well as in America.^[71]

In his free time, Thomas visited the cinema in Uplands, took walks along Swansea Bay, and frequented Swansea's pubs, especially the Antelope and the Mermaid Hotels in Mumbles.^[72][73] In the Kardomah Café, close to the newspaper office in Castle Street, he met his creative contemporaries, including his friend the poet Vernon Watkins and the musician and composer, Daniel Jones with whom, as teenagers, Thomas had helped to set up the "Warmley Broadcasting Corporation".^[74] This group of writers, musicians and artists became known as "The Kardomah Gang".^[75] This was also the period of his friendship with Bert Trick, a local shopkeeper, left-wing political activist and would-be poet,^[76] and with the Rev.

Leon Atkin, a Swansea minister, human rights activist and local politician.^[77]

In , Thomas visited London for probably the first time.^{[nb 8]}

London, –

Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: "And death shall have no dominion", "Before I Knocked" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower".

"And death shall have no dominion" appeared in the New English Weekly in May ^[10] In May , Thomas made his first visit to Laugharne, "the strangest town in Wales", as he described it in an extended letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, in which he also writes about the town's estuarine bleakness, and the dismal lives of the women cockle pickers working the shore around him.^[78]

From onwards, poet Victor Neuburg edited a section called "The Poet's Corner" in a British newspaper, the Sunday Referee.^[79] Here he encouraged new talent by awarding weekly prizes.^[80] One prize went to the then-unknown Thomas,^[80] and the publisher of the Sunday Referee sponsored^[80] and Neuburg arranged for the publication of Thomas's first book, 18 Poems, in December ^[79] The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves.^[81]18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was "the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years".^[10][18] The volume was critically acclaimed, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir.

When "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in The Listener in , it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender.

The following year, in September , Thomas met Vernon Watkins, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. Thomas introduced Watkins, working at Lloyds Bank at the time, to his friends, now known as The Kardomah Gang.

In those days, Thomas used to frequent the cinema on Mondays with Tom Warner who, like Watkins, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. After these trips, Warner would bring Thomas back for supper with his aunt. On one occasion, when she served him a boiled egg, she had to cut its top off for him, as Thomas did not know how to do this.

This was because his mother had done it for him all his life, an example of her coddling him. Years later, his wife Caitlin would still have to prepare his eggs for him.^[85]

In December , Thomas contributed the poem "The Hand That Signed the Paper" to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse.^[87] In , his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J.

M. Dent, also received much critical praise. Two years later, in , Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. During this time Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.^[18]

By the late s, Thomas was embraced as the "poetic herald" for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics.^[89] Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto.

He later stated that he believed they were "intellectual muckpots leaning on a theory".^[89] Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece, modelled their work on Thomas's.^[89]

In the politically charged atmosphere of the s Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of his holding close links with the communists; he was also decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist.^[90] He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against the British Union of Fascists.^[90] Bert Trick has provided an extensive account of an Oswald Mosley rally in the Plaza cinema in Swansea in July that he and Thomas attended.^[91]

Marriage

In early , Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara (–), a year-old dancer of Irish and French Quaker descent.^[92] She had run away from home, intent on making a career in dance, and aged 18 joined the chorus line at the London Palladium.^[94][95] Introduced by Augustus John, Caitlin's lover, they met in The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End.^[95][96] Laying his head in her lap, a drunken Thomas proposed.^[94][97] Thomas liked to assert that he and Caitlin were in bed together ten minutes after they first met.

Although Caitlin initially continued her relationship with John, she and Thomas began a correspondence, and in the second half of were courting. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on 11 July

In May , they moved to Wales, renting a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. They lived there intermittently^{[nb 9]} for just under two years until July , and did not return to live in Laugharne until ^{[nb 10]} Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January

Wartime –

In , a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since , appeared as The Map of Love.

Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales.^[10] 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 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire.^{[nb 11]} 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

At the outset of the Second World War, worried about conscription, Thomas unsuccessfully sought 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 – proved to be the grounds for the military 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 broadcasting for the BBC and documentary film making, work he took up in after he and Caitlin moved to London, leaving their son with Caitlin’s mother at Blashford.

Thomas produced film scripts for the Strand Film Company, work which provided him with a much needed financial mainstay throughout the war years and his first regular source of income since working for the South Wales Daily Post.

In February , 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 The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war.^[]

In early , 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 , 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.

Escaping to Wales

The Thomas family also made several escapes back to Wales.

Between and , 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 ().

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 film The Edge of Love.

In July , 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.^{[nb 12]} 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 and first published in October ^{[][nb 13]}

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." Walford Davies, who co-edited the 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."

War poetry

Thomas’s horror of war, foreshadowed in some of his poems of the s^[] and fuelled by his lived experience of the bombing raids and fire storms of the Blitz in London, received further expression in his poems of the war period.

Dylan thomas and vera phillips: Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in , and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film. Despite criticism by sections of academia, Thomas's work has been embraced by readers more so than many of his contemporaries, and is one of the few modern poets whose name is recognised by the general public. Amer Library Assn. Dylan Remembered, Volume 2: —

These include elegies for an elderly man – Among Those Killed in a Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred () – and for child victims of incendiary bombing raids in Ceremony After a Fire Raid () and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (). They were collected in Deaths and Entrances, the fourth volume of his poetry, published in The sentiments expressed in his war poems were, according to Walford Davies, representative of “the real temper of the British people of the time – the resilience and the guts”.^[]

Making films –

From September Thomas worked for the Strand Film Company in London.

Strand produced films for the Ministry of Information and Thomas produced film scripts for six such films in This is Colour (on aniline dye processing), New Towns for Old, Balloon Site (a recruitment film), CEMA (on arts organisation), Young Farmers and Battle for Freedom. He also scripted and produced Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain, a British Council commission and a bi-lingual production.^[]These Are The Men () was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally.^{[nb 14]}Conquest of a Germ () explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Our Country () was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry.^[][]

Thomas continued to work in the film industry after the war, working on feature film scripts which included: No Room at the Inn (), The Three Weird Sisters (), The Doctor and the Devils ( - not produced until ) and Rebecca's Daughters ( – not produced until ).

His screenplay for The Beach of Falesá, not produced as a film, received a BBC Radio 3 production in May ^[] Altogether in his work in the film industry Thomas produced 28 film scripts (not all of which reached production) as well as acting as producer and director in some cases. When recession overtook the film industry in the late s he lost his most reliable source of income.

The experience he gained in his film work was a significant factor, according to Walford Davies, in the maturation of Under Milk Wood.^[]

Broadcasting years –

Although Thomas had previously written for the BBC, it was a minor and intermittent source of income.

In , he wrote and recorded a minute talk titled "Reminiscences of Childhood" for the Welsh BBC. In December , he recorded Quite Early One Morning (produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies, again for the Welsh BBC) but when Davies offered it for national broadcast BBC London turned it down. On 31 August , the BBC Home Service broadcast Quite Early One Morning and, in the three years beginning in October , Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation.

Thomas was employed not only for his poetry readings, but for discussions and critiques.^[]

In the second half of , Thomas began reading for the BBC Radio programme, Book of Verse, broadcast weekly to the Far East. This provided Thomas with a regular income and brought him into contact with Louis MacNeice, a congenial drinking companion whose advice Thomas cherished.

On 29 September , the BBC began transmitting the Third Programme, a high-culture network which provided opportunities for Thomas. He appeared in the play Comus for the Third Programme, the day after the network launched, and his rich, sonorous voice led to character parts, including the lead in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Satan in an adaptation of Paradise Lost.

Thomas remained a popular guest on radio talk shows for the BBC, who regarded him as "useful should a younger generation poet be needed". He had an uneasy relationship with BBC management and a staff job was never an option, with drinking cited as the problem. Despite this, Thomas became a familiar radio voice and within Britain was "in every sense a celebrity".^[]

By late September , the Thomases had left Wales and were living with various friends in London.

In December, they moved to Oxford to live in a summerhouse on the banks of the Cherwell.

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Dylan thomas biography poems

Dylan thomas biography 1914

It belonged to the historian, A. J. P. Taylor. His wife, Margaret, would prove to be Thomas's most committed patron.

The publication of Deaths and Entrances in February was a major turning point for Thomas. Poet and critic Walter J. Turner commented in The Spectator, "This book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet".^[]

Italy, South Leigh and Prague

The following year, in April , the Thomases travelled to Italy, after Thomas had been awarded a Society of Authors scholarship.

They stayed first in villas near Rapallo and then Florence, before moving to a hotel in Rio Marina on the island of Elba.^[] On their return, Thomas and family moved, in September , into the Manor House in South Leigh, just west of Oxford, found for him by Margaret Taylor. He continued with his work for the BBC, completed a number of film scripts and worked further on his ideas for Under Milk Wood,^[] including a discussion in late of The Village of the Mad (as the play was then called) with the BBC producer Philip Burton.

He later recalled that, during the meeting, Thomas had discussed his ideas for having a blind narrator, an organist who played for a dog and two lovers who wrote to each other every day but never met.^[]

In March Thomas travelled to Prague. He had been invited by the Czech government to attend the inauguration of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union.

Jiřina Hauková, who had previously published translations of some of Thomas's poems, was his guide and interpreter.^{[nb 15]} In her memoir, Hauková recalls that at a party in Prague, Thomas "narrated the first version of his radio play Under Milk Wood." She describes how he outlined the plot about a town that was declared insane, mentioning the organist who played for sheep and goats^{[nb 16]} and the baker with two wives.^[]

and back to Laugharne

A month later, in May , Thomas and his family moved to his final home, the Boat House at Laugharne, purchased for him at a cost of £2, in April by Margaret Taylor.

Thomas acquired a garage a hundred yards from the house on a cliff ledge which he turned into his writing shed, and where he wrote several of his most acclaimed poems.^[] He also rented "Pelican House" opposite his regular drinking den, Brown's Hotel, for his parents^[] who lived there from until

Caitlin gave birth to their third child, a boy named Colm Garan Hart, on 25 July

In October, the New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow, came to visit Thomas at the Boat House, who took him to his writing shed and "fished out a draft to show me of the unfinished Under Milk Wood" that was, says Curnow, titled The Town That Was Mad.^[] This is the first known sighting of the script of the play that was to become Under Milk Wood.^[]

America, Iran and Under Milk Wood, –

American poet John Brinnin invited Thomas to New York, where in February they embarked on a lucrative three-month tour of arts centres and campuses.

The tour, which began in front of an audience of a thousand at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Poetry Centre in New York, took in about 40 venues.^{[nb 17]} During the tour, Thomas was invited to many parties and functions and on several occasions became drunk – going out of his way to shock people – and was a difficult guest.

Thomas drank before some of his readings, though it is argued he may have pretended to be more affected by it than he actually was. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled how intoxicating a performer he was and how the tension would build before a performance: "Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party?

Would he be offensive, violent, obscene?"^[18] Caitlin said in her memoir, "Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it."^[18]

On returning to Britain, Thomas began work on two further poems, "In the white giant's thigh", which he read on the Third Programme in September , and the incomplete "In country heaven".

In October, Thomas sent a draft of the first 39 pages of 'The Town That Was Mad' to the BBC. The task of seeing this work through to production as Under Milk Wood was assigned to the BBC's Douglas Cleverdon, who had been responsible for casting Thomas in 'Paradise Lost'.

Despite Cleverdon's urgings, the script slipped from Thomas's priorities and in January he went to Iran to work on a film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, an assignment which Callard has speculated^[] was undertaken on behalf of British intelligence agencies.^[] Thomas toured the country with the film crew, and his letters home vividly express his shock and anger with the poverty he saw around him.

He also gave a reading at the British Council^[] and talked with a number of Iranian intellectuals, including Ebrahim Golestan whose account of his meeting with Thomas has been translated and published.^[] The film was never made, with Thomas returning to Wales in February, though his time in Iran allowed him to provide a few minutes of material for a BBC documentary, 'Persian Oil'.

Thomas' journey through Iran has also been the subject of the documentary film Pouring Water on Troubled Oil. The film was written and directed by Nariman Massoumi, Department of Film and Television at Bristol University, with narration by Michael Sheen.^[]

Later that year, Thomas published two poems, which have been described as "unusually blunt." They were an ode, in the form of a villanelle, to his dying father, Do not go gentle into that good night, and the ribald Lament.^[]

Although he had a range of wealthy patrons, including Margaret Taylor, Princess Marguerite Caetani and Marged Howard-Stepney, Thomas was still in financial difficulty, and he wrote several begging letters to notable literary figures, including T.

S. Eliot. Taylor was not keen on Thomas taking another trip to the United States, and thought that if he had a permanent address in London he would be able to gain steady work there. She bought a property, 54 Delancey Street, in Camden Town, and in late Thomas and Caitlin lived in the basement flat.^[] Thomas would describe the flat as his "London house of horror" and did not return there after his tour of America.^[]

Second tour January 20 to May 16,

Thomas undertook a second tour of the United States in , this time with Caitlin – after she had discovered he had been unfaithful on his earlier trip.

They drank heavily, and Thomas began to suffer with gout and lung problems. The second tour was the most intensive of the four, taking in 46 engagements. The trip also resulted in Thomas recording his first poetry to vinyl, which Caedmon Records released in America later that year. One of his works recorded during this time, A Child's Christmas in Wales, became his most popular prose work in America.

The original recording of the book was a selection for the United States National Recording Registry, stating that it is "credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States".^[]

A shortened version of the first half of The Town That Was Mad was published in Botteghe Oscure in May , with the title Llareggub.

A Piece for Radio Perhaps. Thomas had been in Laugharne for almost three years, but his half-play had made little progress since his time living in South Leigh. By the summer of , the half-play's title had been changed to Under Milk Wood because John Brinnin thought the title Llareggub would not attract American audiences.

On 6 November , Thomas wrote to the editor of Botteghe Oscure to explain why he hadn't been able to "finish the second half of my piece for you." He had failed shamefully, he said, to add to "my lonely half of a looney maybe-play".^[]

On 10 November Thomas's last collection Collected Poems, –, was published by Dent; he was It won the Foyle poetry prize.^[] Reviewing the volume, critic Philip Toynbee declared that "Thomas is the greatest living poet in the English language".

The winter of /3 brought much personal tragedy: Thomas's father died from pneumonia just before Christmas ; and in the Spring of his sister died from liver cancer, one of his patrons overdosed, three friends died at young ages and Caitlin had an abortion.

Third tour 21 April to 3 June

In April , Thomas returned alone for a third tour of America.

He performed a "work in progress" version of Under Milk Wood, solo, for the first time at Harvard University on 3 May. A week later, the work was performed with a full cast at the Poetry Centre in New York. He met the deadline only after being locked in a room by Brinnin's assistant, Liz Reitell, and he was still editing the script on the afternoon of the performance; its last lines were handed to the actors as they were putting on their makeup.

During this penultimate tour, Thomas met the composer Igor Stravinsky who had become an admirer after having been introduced to his poetry by W.

H. Auden. They had discussions about collaborating on a "musical theatrical work" for which Thomas would provide the libretto on the theme of "the rediscovery of love and language in what might be left after the world after the bomb." The shock of Thomas's death later in the year moved Stravinsky to compose his In Memoriam Dylan Thomas for tenor, string quartet and four trombones.

The first performance in Los Angeles in was introduced with a tribute to Thomas from Aldous Huxley.^[]

Thomas spent the last nine or ten days of his third tour in New York mostly in the company of Reitell, with whom he had an affair.

Poet dylan thomas biography In Thomas, David N. Caitlin, The life of Caitlin Thomas. Thomas came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer was difficult. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog , were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales.

During this time, Thomas fractured his arm falling down a flight of stairs when drunk. Reitell's doctor, Milton Feltenstein, put his arm in plaster and treated him for gout and gastritis.

After returning home, Thomas worked on Under Milk Wood in Laugharne. Aeronwy, his daughter, noticed that his health had "visibly deterioratedI could hear his racking cough.

Every morning he had a prolonged coughing attackThe coughing was nothing new but it seemed worse than before." She also noted that the blackouts that Thomas was experiencing were "a constant source of comment" amongst his Laugharne friends.

Thomas sent the original manuscript to Douglas Cleverdon on 15 October It was copied and returned to Thomas, who lost it in a pub in London and required a duplicate to take to America.^[] Thomas flew to the States on 19 October for what would be his final tour.

He died in New York before the BBC could record Under Milk Wood.^[][]Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in , and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film.^[] In , the play won the Prix Italia for literary or dramatic programmes.^{[nb 18]}

Final tour and death in New York

Thomas left Laugharne on 9 October on the first leg of his fourth trip to America. He called on his mother, Florence, to say goodbye: "He always felt that he had to get out from this country because of his chest being so bad." Thomas had suffered from chest problems for most of his life, though they began in earnest soon after he moved in May to the Boat House at Laugharne – the "bronchial heronry", as he called it.^[] Within weeks of moving in, he visited a local doctor, who prescribed medicine for both his chest and throat.^[]

While waiting in London before his flight, Thomas stayed with the comedian Harry Locke and worked on Under Milk Wood.

Locke noted that Thomas was having trouble with his chest, "terrible" coughing fits that made him go purple in the face. He was also using an inhaler to help his breathing. There were reports, too, that Thomas was also having blackouts. His visit to the BBC producer Philip Burton, a few days before he left for New York, was interrupted by a blackout.

On his last night in London, he had another in the company of his fellow poet Louis MacNeice.^[]

Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October to undertake further performances of Under Milk Wood, organised by John Brinnin, his American agent and Director of the Poetry Centre. Brinnin did not travel to New York but remained in Boston to write.^[] He handed responsibility to his assistant, Liz Reitell.

She met Thomas at Idlewild Airport and was shocked at his appearance. He looked pale, delicate and shaky, not his usual robust self: "He was very ill when he got here." After being taken by Reitell to check in at the Chelsea Hotel, Thomas took the first rehearsal of Under Milk Wood. They then went to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, before returning to the Chelsea Hotel.

The next day, Reitell invited him to her apartment, but he declined.

They went sightseeing, but Thomas felt unwell and retired to his bed for the rest of the afternoon. Reitell gave him half a grain ( milligrams) of phenobarbitone to help him sleep and spent the night at the hotel with him. Two days later, on 23 October, at the third rehearsal, Thomas said he was too ill to take part, but he struggled on, shivering and burning with fever, before collapsing on the stage.

The following day, 24 October, Reitell took Thomas to see her doctor, Milton Feltenstein, who administered cortisone injections and Thomas made it through the first performance that evening, but collapsed immediately afterwards.

"This circus out there," he told a friend who had come back-stage, "has taken the life out of me for now." Reitell later said that Feltenstein was "rather a wild doctor who thought injections would cure anything."

At the next performance on 25 October, his fellow actors realised that Thomas was very ill: "He was desperately ill…we didn't think that he would be able to do the last performance because he was so ill…Dylan literally couldn't speak he was so ill…still my greatest memory of it is that he had no voice."

On the evening of 27 October, Thomas attended his 39th birthday party but felt unwell and returned to his hotel after an hour.

Dylan thomas biography bbc winston Walford Davies. John Goodby states that this popularity with the reading public allows Thomas's work to be classed as vulgar and common. Thomas, David N. Many sources have criticised Feltenstein's role and actions, especially his incorrect diagnosis of delirium tremens and the high dose of morphine he administered.

The next day, he took part in Poetry and the Film, a recorded symposium at Cinema

A turning point came on 2 November. Air pollution in New York had risen significantly and exacerbated chest illnesses such as Thomas had. By the end of the month, over New Yorkers had died from the smog. On 3&#;November, Thomas spent most of the day in his room, entertaining various friends.

He went out in the evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel, he went out again for a drink at 2&#;am. After drinking at the White Horse, Thomas returned to the Hotel Chelsea, declaring, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record!" The barman and the owner of the pub who served him later commented that Thomas could not have drunk more than half that amount.^[]

Thomas had an appointment at a clam house in New Jersey with Ruthven Todd on 4 November.^[] When Todd telephoned the Chelsea that morning, Thomas said he was feeling ill and postponed the engagement.

Todd thought he sounded "terrible". The poet, Harvey Breit, was another to phone that morning. He thought that Thomas sounded "bad". Thomas's voice, recalled Breit, was "low and hoarse". He had wanted to say: "You sound as though from the tomb", but instead he told Thomas that he sounded like Louis Armstrong.

Later, Thomas went drinking with Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick again, returned to the hotel.

Feltenstein came to see him three times that day, administering the cortisone secretant ACTH by injection (a tropicpeptide hormone produced and secreted by the anterior pituitary gland)^[] and, on his third visit, half a grain ( milligrams) of morphine sulphate. This amount was three times more than was medically appropriate and was, by affecting Thomas's breathing and consequently the oxygen supply to his brain, the precipitating cause of his death.^[] After Reitell became increasingly concerned and telephoned Feltenstein for advice he suggested she get male assistance, so she called upon the painter Jack Heliker, who arrived before 11&#;pm.^[] At midnight on 5 November, Thomas's breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue.^[] Reitell phoned Feltenstein who arrived at the hotel at about 1&#;am, and called for an ambulance.^{[nb 19]} It then took another hour for the ambulance to arrive at St.

Vincent's, even though it was only a few blocks from the Chelsea.

Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent's Hospital at &#;am. He was comatose, and his medical notes state that "the impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response".^[] Feltenstein then took control of Thomas's care, even though he did not have admitting rights at St.

Vincent's. The hospital's senior brain specialist, C.G. Gutierrez-Mahoney, was not called to examine Thomas until the afternoon of 6 November, some 36 hours after Thomas's admission.

Caitlin, having flown from Britain, arrived at the hospital the following morning, by which time a tracheotomy had been performed. Her first words are reported to have been, "Is the bloody man dead yet?"^[] Permitted to see Thomas for a short time, she returned, drunk, in the afternoon and made threats to John Brinnin.

Feltenstein had her put into a straitjacket and committed to the River Crest Sanitarium.

It is now believed that Thomas had been suffering from bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema and asthma before his admission to St Vincent's. In their paper, Death by Neglect, D. N. Thomas and former GP Principal Simon Barton disclose that Thomas was found to have pneumonia when he was admitted to hospital in a coma.

Doctors took three hours to restore his breathing, using artificial respiration and oxygen. Summarising their findings, they conclude: "The medical notes indicate that, on admission, Dylan's bronchial disease was found to be very extensive, affecting upper, mid and lower lung fields, both left and right." The forensic pathologist, Bernard Knight, who examined the post-mortem report, concurs: "death was clearly due to a severe lung infection with extensive advanced bronchopneumoniathe severity of the chest infection, with greyish consolidated areas of well-established pneumonia, suggests that it had started before admission to hospital."^[]

Thomas died at noon on 9&#;November, having never recovered from his coma.^[][] A nurse, and the poet John Berryman, were present with him at the time of death.^[]

Aftermath

Rumours circulated of a brain haemorrhage, followed by competing reports of a mugging or even that Thomas had drunk himself to death.^[] Later, speculation arose about drugs and diabetes.

Dylan thomas biography summary A pham, yn union, y cafodd ei waith yr effaith a gafodd pan ymddangosodd gyntaf mewn print? Thomas's father died from pneumonia just before Christmas Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield, Gloucestershire. He wrote begging letters to random literary figures asking for support, a plan he hoped would provide a long-term regular income.

At the post-mortem, the pathologist found three causes of death&#;– pneumonia, brain swelling and a fatty liver. His liver showed no sign of cirrhosis.^[]

The publication of John Brinnin's biography Dylan Thomas in America cemented Thomas's reputation as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet";^[3] Brinnin focuses on Thomas's last few years and paints a picture of him as a drunk and a philanderer.^[] Later biographies have criticised Brinnin's view, especially his coverage of Thomas's death.

David Thomas in Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? writes that Brinnin, along with Reitell and Feltenstein, were culpable.^[] FitzGibbon's biography ignores Thomas's heavy drinking and skims over his death, giving just two pages in his detailed book to Thomas's demise. Ferris in his biography includes Thomas's heavy drinking, but is more critical of those around him in his final days and does not draw the conclusion that he drank himself to death.

Many^[quantify] sources have criticised Feltenstein's role and actions, especially his incorrect diagnosis of delirium tremens and the high dose of morphine he administered.^[] Dr C. G. de Gutierrez-Mahoney, the doctor who treated Thomas while at St. Vincents, concluded that Feltenstein's failure to see that Thomas was gravely ill and have him admitted to hospital sooner "was even more culpable than his use of morphine".

Caitlin Thomas's autobiographies, Leftover Life to Kill () and My Life with Dylan Thomas: Double Drink Story (), describe the effects of alcohol on him and their relationship.

"Ours was not only a love story, it was a drink story, because without alcohol it would never had got on its rocking feet", she wrote, and "The bar was our altar." Biographer Andrew Lycett ascribed the decline in Thomas's health to an alcoholic co-dependent relationship with his wife, who deeply resented his extramarital affairs.

In contrast, Dylan biographers Andrew Sinclair and George Tremlett express the view that Thomas was not an alcoholic. Tremlett argues that many of Thomas's health issues stemmed from undiagnosed diabetes.^[]

Thomas died intestate, with assets worth £ His body was brought back to Wales for burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne.^[] Thomas's funeral, which Brinnin did not attend, took place at St Martin's Church in Laugharne on 24 November.

Six friends from the village carried Thomas's coffin. Caitlin, without her customary hat, walked behind the coffin, with his childhood friend Daniel Jones at her arm and her mother by her side.^[]