Thomas, Dylan (Marlais)

Thomas, Dylan (Marlais) (1914–53), poet, born in Swansea, where he worked as a journalist before moving to London in 1934; his first volume of verse, 18 Poems, appeared in the same year. He then embarked on a Grub Street career of journalism, broadcasting, and film-making, rapidly acquiring a reputation for exuberance and flamboyance, as both poet and personality. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara. Thomas's romantic, affirmative, rhetorical style gradually won a large following; it was both new and influential (and much imitated by his contemporaries of the New Apocalypse movement), and the publication of Deaths and Entrances (1946), which contains some of his best-known work (including ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London’) established him with a wide public: his Collected Poems 1934–1952 (1952) sold extremely well.

Thomas also wrote a considerable amount of prose. The Map of Love (1939) is a collection of prose and verse; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) is a collection of largely autobiographical short stories; Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955) is a collection of stories; A Prospect of the Sea (1955) is a collection of stories and essays. Shortly before his death he took part in a reading in New York of what was to be his most famous single work, Under Milk Wood. His Notebooks (ed. R. N. Maud) were published in 1968, and a new edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas, with critical notes and comments by Daniel Jones, in 1971.