Dylan Thomas: The writer

While he was a young boy, Dylan's mother Florence read to him whenever she could, or gave him comics to read alone. She later claimed it was with these that the child taught himself to read. DJ, his father, took a different approach, choosing to read Shakespeare aloud to his son, which introduced him to the colours and sounds of language.

Both parents encouraged the young Dylan to write, and he came to desperately want to prove himself as a writer. In January 1927 he sold a poem, His Requiem, to the Western Mail newspaper in Cardiff. Although it has since been identified as the work of another writer, it is testament to his ambition and desire to succeed.

At school, the only subject in which he excelled was English. But as an unruly child, he was undisciplined and mostly underachieving. In 1931 he left school, and got a job as a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post. He was not wholly successful, and was eventually sacked though he continued working as a freelance journalist sporadically for several more years.

1933 was the year in which his poetry began to receive greater exposure. He was published in periodicals, and a submission to a BBC poetry competition resulted in it being read on air.

The following year he moved to London, where he attained notoriety as a drunken boor, although his first poetry collection, 18 Poems was praised by a number of established poets including Edith Sitwell. Yet he was steadily acquiring a reputation as a drunk rather than as a writer.

The main themes of Dylan Thomas' poetry were nostalgia, life, death, and lost innocence. He wrote often about his past as a boy or as a young man. And Wales, and the Welsh landscapes and people, became an integral part of his writing.

The isolation he often felt while living in Wales, particularly in Laugharne and New Quay, informed his writing and spurred him to introspection. It's no coincidence that he wrote many of his finest works away from London and America.