by Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas (1914-53), Wales’s most renowned modern poet, was born in the seaport town of Swansea on the southern Welsh coast. From his father, a school teacher with literary interests and atheistic beliefs, the young Dylan Thomas early acquired a love of poetry and literature; from his mother, a warm and highly religious woman from a large rural family, he inherited a spiritual if undogmatic sensibility, along with a love of nature and the countryside. As critics have discovered by examining his early notebooks, the vast majority of his poems were conceived (if not necessarily put into final form) before Thomas was 21. In addition to several collections of poetry, he also wrote a number of prose works, often autobiographical in nature: a book of short stories (Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, 1940); an unfinished novel (posthumously published as...