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.

First Line	Comments
(for Llewelyn)
A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry	2 Comments
A process in the weather of the heart
A stranger has come
All that I owe the fellows of the grave
And death shall have no dominion.	44 Comments
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
Do not go gentle into that good night,	39 Comments
Ears in the turrets hear	2 Comments
Especially when the October wind
Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,
From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft second
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
How shall my animal	10 Comments
I	3 Comments
I
I	2 Comments
I
I	1 Comment
I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking
I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
I have longed to move away	2 Comments
If I were tickled by the rub of love,	3 Comments
In my craft or sullen art	3 Comments
In the beginning was the three-pointed star,	2 Comments
In the mustardseed sun,	4 Comments
Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
It was my thirtieth year to heaven	13 Comments
Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
Light breaks where no sun shines;	5 Comments
My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
My tears are like the quiet drift	4 Comments
Never until the mankind making	8 Comments
Not from this anger, anticlimax after
Now	1 Comment
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs	21 Comments
O
O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
On almost the incendiary eve	1 Comment
On no work of words now for three lean months in the
Once it was the colour of saying
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,	1 Comment
Sometimes the sky's too bright,
The bows glided down, and the coast
The conversation of prayers about to be said
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower	2 Comments
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;	3 Comments
The seed-at-zero shall not storm
The sky is torn across
Then was my neophyte,
There was a saviour
This day winding down now
To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died	2 Comments
Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
When all my five and country senses see,
When I was a windy boy and a bit	2 Comments
When once the twilight locks no longer
When the morning was waking over the war	1 Comment
When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Where once the waters of your face
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