Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953)

Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty.

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914. After grammar school he moved to London where, in 1934, his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems, was published. At this early age, he revealed unusual power in the use of poetic diction and imagery; the volume won him immediate critical acclaim. Thematically, these poems and virtually all that followed seem obscure because they contain elements of surrealism and personal fantasy. But the freshness and vitality of Thomas's language draw the reader into the poems and reveal the universality of the experiences with which they are concerned. This introspective tendency is less apparent in Deaths and Entrances (1946) and In Country Sleep (1951), which 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. During World War II (1939-1945) Thomas wrote scripts for documentary motion pictures.

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 radiobroadcast; when Thomas read it for its first public performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1953, it was still unfinished. The work became his most famous piece; it evokes the lives of the inhabitants of Llareggub, a small, Welsh seaside town. Noted for his readings of his own verse, Thomas became legendary in the United States, where he gave many lecture tours and gained a wide following. Nevertheless, his last years were shadowed by an increasingly tragic view of his own tempestuous life. His death in New York City on November 9, 1953, was brought on by alcoholism.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

	Poem	Comments
	Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night	95 Comments
	How Shall My Animal	62 Comments
	And Death Shall Have No Dominion	51 Comments
	Fern Hill	25 Comments
	Poem In October	15 Comments
	A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London	13 Comments
	Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines	8 Comments
	Poem On His Birthday	5 Comments
	All All And All The Dry Worlds Lever	4 Comments
	Clown In The Moon	4 Comments
	The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower	4 Comments
	A Letter To My Aunt	3 Comments
	I See The Boys Of Summer	3 Comments
	If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love	3 Comments
	In My Craft Or Sullen Art	3 Comments
	In The Beginning	3 Comments
	The Hand That Signed The Paper	3 Comments
	Ears In The Turrets Hear	2 Comments
	Elegy	2 Comments
	I Have Longed To Move Away	2 Comments
	Lament	2 Comments
	A Child's Christmas In Wales	1 Comment
	Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred	1 Comment
	Author's Prologue	1 Comment
	Deaths And Entrances	1 Comment
	Now	1 Comment
	Our Eunuch Dreams	1 Comment
	Should Lanterns Shine	1 Comment
	A Process In The Weather Of The Heart
	All That I Owe The Fellows Of The Grave
	Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait
	Before I Knocked
	Especially When The October Wind
	Foster The Light
	From Love's First Fever To Her Plague
	Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes In The Cuckoo's Month
	Holy Spring
	I Dreamed My Genesis
	I Fellowed Sleep
	I, In My Intricate Image
	Incarnate Devil
	January 1939
	Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
	Love In The Asylum
	My Hero Bares His Nerves
	My World Is Pyramid
	Not From This Anger
	O Make Me A Mask
	On A Wedding Anniversary
	On No Work Of Words
	Once It Was The Colour Of Saying
	Sometimes The Sky's Too Bright
	The Conversation Of Prayer
	The Seed-At-Zero
	Then Was My Neophyte
	There Was A Saviour
	This Side Of The Truth
	To-Day, This Insect
	Twenty-Four Years
	Vision and Prayer [I]
	Was There A Time
	When All My Five And Country Senses See
	When Once The Twilight Locks No Longer
	When, Like A Running Grave
	Where Once The Waters Of Your Face