Britain’s Last Romantic Poet: Dylan Thomas


Even before Dylan was born, future contradictions cast their shadow. His father, David John Thomas, was totally Anglicized and a teacher of English literature at Swansea Grammar School. He was atheistic in the extreme, a lifelong opponent of religion, whether pagan or Christian, who was always ‘railing against God. His angry rejection took the form of continual cursing against the damp Welsh weather. Staring at the rain streaming down the windows of the family house in Swansea, he would shout, It’s raining, blast Him!

Dylan’s mother, on the other hand, was a staunch Christian chapel-goer. Her road to salvation was narrow and Non-Conformist but undeviating. She imposed some of her religious influence on her gifted son. Florence Thomas gave Dylan his totally unformulated love of God, in complete contrast to his father’s explicit atheism. This must have led to great turbulence within the marriage, and it is easy to understand why Dylan’s poetry and his personality were so ambivalent.



Dylan Thomas was born on 27th October under the zodiacal sign of Scorpio. Certainly, he seems to have had many Scorpio characteristics–passion, lust, violence, insight, and profundity. The dark nature of Scorpio might be said to have found a natural home in Dylan.



This perceptive comment sums up the archetypal Welshman and it sums up the complex character of Dylan Thomas. Certainly the drunkenness that is said to be a perennial weakness of the Celts was a fatal flaw in his character. The Celtic liking for a drink was even remarked upon by the Romans (themselves no mean tipplers) and hard drinking was prevalent among the miners of the South Wales valleys, near which Dylan grew up.

From the beginning, there was not much doubt about Dylan’s future career. His father’s constant efforts to involve Dylan in English literature, at the highest level, were bound to bear fruit. The only subject in which Dylan was interested, and indeed the only one at which he excelled, was English.












The main attractions at Laugharne, apart from the sea, were two public houses: The Cross House Inn and Brown’s Hotel, where Dylan satisfied his taste for alcohol and his equally important need to entertain, to hold forth upon any subject that appealed to his fertile imagination. He was well known in the tap room at Brown’s Hotel. There may still be people at Laugharne who can boast that they heard a discourse by Britain’s last romantic poet.

Every morning, in the isolation of his summerhouse (affectionately called the shack), Dylan worked at his poems, striving for an elusive perfection. He would make as many as 500 alterations in a single poem, copying out the entire poem after each alteration, so that he could see his word sculpture taking shape before his eyes. He was a craftsman par excellence. Few poets have labored so mightily or sacrificed so much for their work–that sullen art, as he called it. Self-indulgence and sacrifice: those contradictory terms describe him accurately, for no one ever drank harder or worked harder than he did.


His work may appear to be obscure but not when one understands the ambivalence of his thought. He aimed at conflict and contradiction in his poems, choosing not only words capable of opposite interpretations but also subjects that aroused conflicting emotions. His poem In the White Giant’s Thigh is an example. It relates to the Neolithic Age Man carved into a chalk hillside on England’s


Many Americans feel a deep personal interest in Dylan. He made grueling lecture tours in the States, like Charles Dickens before him–and, as with Dickens, they proved fatal. Drink and adulation were put before Dylan in vast quantities and he thrived on both. His grotesque figure–badly dressed and obese–as well as his wonderfully middle-class, literary English voice exerted a fascination over Americans that was almost without precedent.

The end came after a binge of almost monumental proportions. He said: I’ve had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record. His last words were: After 39 years this is all I’ve done. He lay in an alcohol-induce coma for a week before he died, at age 39, in New York.

Dylan lies buried in the cemetery at St. Martin’s Church, Laugharne. Caitlin had the satisfaction of knowing that she helped a remarkable poet create his own view of life and of nature in the workroom overlooking the sea that he loved so much.


  1. If Dylan found humour in the fact that the feet of the Cerne Abbas giant actually touch the walls of the Christian abbey there, his White Giant’s Thigh does not indicate it. Neither does it bear out in actuality, for the feet of the giant are almost eight hundred feet from the closest part of the old abbey walls.

    • … the westernmost point of the South Downs is miles away from Cerne Abbas, in the Itchen valley of mid-Hampshire. You’re thinking of the beautiful Dorset Downs.
