Dylan Thomas

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Standard Name: Thomas, Dylan
Birth Name: Dylan Marlais Thomas
DT acquired instant fame as a very young man in the 1930s when his earliest poems were published. Throughout his short life he turned out journalistic hack work and reviews; as well as poetry he published short stories and essays. His most famous work is his radio drama Under Milk Wood, about the inhabitants of an imaginary Welsh village.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Adrienne Rich
Here she was introduced to the poetry of Donne , Yeats , Eliot , Pound , Frost , Thomas , MacNeice , Stevens , and Ginsberg .
Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics, and the Body. Sage, 1997.
7
Rich enjoyed her time at Radcliffe, though...
Education Jeni Couzyn
JC describes her younger self as a solitary child, rebellious and defiant, challenging everything and everyone.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
217
Some poets became important to her in her youth through the influence of her sisters: Dylan Thomas ...
Family and Intimate relationships Jeni Couzyn
Jeni's sisters offered early poetic encouragement, and provided a connection between literature, as learned in school, and poems written privately. When she was about fifteen, JC remembers one of her sisters giving her two LP...
Family and Intimate relationships Pamela Hansford Johnson
PHJ sent a letter of congratulation when the young poet Dylan Thomas had a poem published (as she had recently had herself) in the Sunday Referee; their correspondence became frequent and personal before they...
Friends, Associates Cecily Mackworth
Other friendships made now or later included many with distinguished women, like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whom she found kinder to me than she apparently was to most other people),
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
112
and Stevie Smith , whom...
Friends, Associates Hélène Barcynska
Friends of HB and her husband during these years included Gwyn Jones , editor of the Welsh Review, George Green of the University of Wales , actress Violet Lamb , and novelist Ruby M. Ayres
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
During the 1930s ES discovered the work of an unknown and very young Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas . She threw herself with vigour into promoting him, and took up the cudgels on his behalf when...
Friends, Associates Ethel Wilson
Through parties hosted by her eventual publisher, the Macmillan Company , EW also met Morley Callaghan , who admired her writing. Other writers she knew included John Gray , A. J. M. Smith , Robert Weaver
Intertextuality and Influence Philip Larkin
His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon.
qtd. in
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester University Press, 2002.
5
The pained exaggeration...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
The book was highly derivative. Though she had just discovered the poems of Pablo Neruda , CAD describes the contents of the volume as a mixture of Keats and Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas and...
Intertextuality and Influence Pamela Hansford Johnson
She was working on it while her family moved house, writing on packing-cases with the removers removing around me.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
115
The title (quoted from John Donne , which misleadingly suggests fulfilled sexual passion) was the...
Leisure and Society William Empson
Empson was a heavy social drinker all his life (at one time a drinking companion of Dylan Thomas ). Haffenden remarks that in China he gained well-deserved status in the Chinese classical tradition of venerably...
Literary responses Djuna Barnes
Nightwood met with varied responses once it was published. It was reviewed well in England, but much more negatively in the USA. Dylan Thomas called it one of the three great prose books ever written...
Literary responses Samuel Beckett
Dylan Thomas called this novel Freud ian blarney: Sodom and Begorrah.
Parker, Peter, editor. The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers. Fourth Estate and Helicon, 1995.
59
Iris Murdoch recorded the lasting impression which it made on her when she first read it.
Federman, Raymond, and John, 1937 - Fletcher. Samuel Beckett. University of California Press, 1970.
21
Harold Pinter —who while trying to...
Literary responses Kathleen Nott
In the TLSG. S. Fraser remarked that her poetry was difficult but rewarding, and likened it in different aspects to that of Dylan Thomas , George Barker , and William Empson . He concluded:...

Timeline

11 June-4 July 1936: The International Surrealist Exhibition was...

Building item

11 June-4 July 1936

The International Surrealist Exhibition was held in the New Burlington Galleries , London. English painter Eileen Agar 's work was chosen to be shown alongside her fellow surrealists such as Paul Nash and Henry Moore

December 1965: Actress Peggy Ashcroft toured Norway with...

Women writers item

December 1965

Actress Peggy Ashcroft toured Norway with a show of her own devising, Words on Women and Some Women's Words, originally written for performance at London University .
Billington, Michael. Peggy Ashcroft, 1907-1991. Mandarin, 1991.
212-13

Texts

Thomas, Dylan. Eighteen Poems. Fortune Press, 1934.
Thomas, Dylan. Quite Early One Morning. J. M. Dent, 1954.
Thomas, Dylan. Twenty-Five Poems. J. M. Dent, 1936.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood: a play for voices. J. M. Dent, 1954.