Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) 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. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914, leaving school in 1932 to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. A number of the some 200 poems he produced between 1931 and 1935 appeared in print while he was still a teenager, including one of his best known, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, the first he had published, in May 1933, in a national journal. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara; they married in 1937 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 1940s brought him to a wider 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 1950s; his readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, 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. Further appraisals following on from new critical editions of his poems have sought to explore in more depth his unique modernist poetic, setting aside the distracting legend of the "doomed poet", and seeking thereby to emphasise his status as a major poet of the 20th century.
Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, the son of Florence Hannah (née Williams; 1882–1958), a seamstress, and David John 'Jack' Thomas (1876–1952), 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. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), who was eight years his senior.
The red-brick, semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the Uplands area), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth.
At the 1921 census, Nancy and Dylan are noted as speaking both Welsh and English. 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." There are three accounts from the 1940s 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. The name Dylan being pronounced [ˈdəlan] 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 later favoured the typical anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be pronounced that way (the same as Dillon ).
Thomas wrote a number of accounts of his childhood growing up in Swansea, 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.
Thomas's four grandparents played no part in his childhood. 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 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. All four aunts and uncles spoke Welsh and English.
Thomas's childhood also featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire. 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. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem "Fern Hill", but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches. Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones, at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm, where he spent his time riding Prince the cart horse, chasing pheasants and fishing for trout.
All these relatives were bilingual, and many worshipped at Smyrna chapel in Llangain where the services were always in Welsh, including Sunday School which Thomas sometimes attended. 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 Welsh...he couldn't speak English when he stopped at Fernhill...in all his surroundings, everybody else spoke Welsh..." At the 1921 census, 95% of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, 13%—more than 200 people—spoke only Welsh.
A few fields south of Fernhill lay Blaencwm, a pair of stone cottages to which his mother's Swansea siblings had retired, and with whom the young Thomas and his sister, Nancy, would sometimes stay. 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 who had married into local gentry. Anne's daughter, Doris, married a dentist, Randy Fulleylove. The young Dylan also holidayed with them in Abergavenny, where Fulleylove had his practice.
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, 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.
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, Pontarddulais 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, and it is said that she herself had lost a child soon after her marriage. If Thomas was protected and spoiled at home, however, the real spoilers were his many aunts and older cousins, those in both Swansea and the Llansteffan countryside. 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.".