On Dylan Thomas’s birthday, revisit Adam Kirsch on the poet who took the very things that cursed his life—self-absorption, childishness, heedlessness—and turned them into blessings—awareness, perception, daring—in his poetry.
What drew crowds to Thomas’s readings wasn’t just the performance; it was the possibility that he would finally crack up.To begin at the beginning: In October, 1914, when the Swansea schoolmaster David John Thomas decided to call his newborn son Dylan, the name was virtually unknown, even in Wales. D.J., as he was called, had found it in the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh tales, where it is the name of a minor character—“a fine boy-child with rich yellow hair.
What makes him unique among poets, even famous poets, is this distinctly modern and American cast of his celebrity. He took part in the savage transaction of stardom: his reckless self-indulgence satisfied his audiences’ fantasies, and his destruction satisfied their moralistic envy. Many people shared an obscure sense of gratification that Thomas had died young, as a poet should. That way, he could be mourned in the grand style, like Adonais: “. . .
The virtue of Lycett’s biography is that although he does not fall under Thomas’s spell, he also resists such summary assessments. Paul Ferris, whose “Dylan Thomas: The Biography” was issued in a revised edition in 2000, remains Thomas’s best and most comprehensive biographer; but half a lifetime spent with Thomas—he also edited the poet’s letters, and wrote a life of Caitlin—clearly sapped his patience.
That December, when Thomas’s “18 Poems” was published as the winner of a contest sponsored by the newspaper, it created a minor sensation in literary London. The book was far from a commercial success—it took two years for the edition of five hundred copies to sell out—but it was widely reviewed, and gained Thomas some important champions.
The only person more revolted by his weakness than Caitlin was Thomas himself. Philip Larkin, the leading British poet of the generation after Thomas’s, claimed to have read his published correspondence “with almost supernatural boredom, scrounging, apologising, promising, apologising again, fixing up appointments, apologising for not keeping them.
His talk, one told me, clung latterly to Eden, again & again of the Garden & the Garden’s flowers, not ever the Creator, only of that creation with a radiant will to go there.