Dylan Thomas: Poet and Playwright
A Profile
“ Dylan Thomas liked small towns by the sea, especially small Welsh towns by the sea…”
Dylan Thomas was a writer of genius whose work never dates, work that is full of summer afternoons and grey wet nights in small Welsh towns, and front parlours, and pubs, and later his boathouse, and the smell of Woodbines and warm bottled beer, and the oversized shirt he wears in the photograph on the front cover of the Aldine edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog: a shirt borrowed from a friend whose sofa he’d slept on the night before the photograph was taken.
Dylan was the son of a brilliant school teacher father who wrote some good poetry, and a seamstress mother with Christian morals. Both parents never really understood how their son became the self-made, heavy drinking, heavy smoking self-styled bohemian poet who had the most Welsh of faces, with a wonderful, but invented, booming and mocking voice of a 19th century English aristocrat astride a steaming horse. He also had a scurrilous side to his nature seen in his choice of title for the above mentioned book, which is a hefty dig into the ribs of James Joyce, and the Irishman’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Of course James Joyce took himself very seriously indeed.
