The life troubles of Dylan Thomas (Swansea, 1914) started from early childhood. He grew up in a Welsh family where only English was spoken, torn between his father, a professor of English literature and a passionate atheist, and his mother, a seamstress and an obsessive believer. His father will instill in him a love of literature - Dylan will recite Shakespeare before he learns to read and write, his mother a love of Welsh antiquity and Celtic lectures.
Going to school will be a source of new frustrations for the sickly - he will be tormented by asthma for the rest of his life - unadaptable and withdrawn boy. Even moving to the language high school where his father taught won't change the introverted 12-year-old. He often runs away from classes, wanders for days in the suburbs of Swansea, his only refuge is the local library where he "discovers" the poetry of EA Poe and the prose of DH Lawrence.
The next stop of the unstable 17-year-old will be the editorial office of "Evening News of South Wales". He was not particularly valuable as a journalist - he was soon fired - but he would remain a "freelancer" in journalism until 1934, when, with a few pounds in his pocket and a couple of poems published in the local newspaper, he moved to London with the firm intention of living exclusively from literature .
Any coincidence with Rimbaud's life is - intentional.
The poetry scene of the island capital in the XNUMXs was marked by the "Oxford Group" - Cecil Day Lewis, Whiston Hugh Auden, Lewis Makmis and Stephen Spender, or, as French critics called them, the "New Groups". Although this "poetry quartet" never represented a school of poetry, nor issued a common manifesto - neither aesthetic nor political - and they were distinct individualists, they had a number of common ideas.
Twenty-year-old Dylan Thomas will not succumb to the siren call of the success of the "Resurgence Group". His first collection "Eighteen Poems" is more influenced by the works of poets of the "older generation" - Yeats, Eliot, Hopkins, Edith Sitwell. Instead of personalities in specific historical conditions, Dilen is interested in elementary, general human and common - birth, death, eternal "circulum vitae".
"Strength through the green wick that drives the flower
It drives me green, from the roots that uproot the trees
The destroyer is mine.
And I'm not the only one to say to the tarnished rose
My youth is crushed by the same winter fever
(From "18 songs", translated by S. Brkić)
"18 Poems" - whose publication was helped by TS Eliot, had a great resonance with both the audience and literary critics. Intoxicated by the meteoric success of his first collection, Dylan Thomas became a regular visitor to London pubs, quenching his burning "thirst for fame" with large quantities of alcohol.
A fatal habit of hanging out in Swansea pubs with colleagues from the local paper as a 16-year-old was now taking its toll.
In one of the pubs, he met the blonde dancer Kathleen McNamara, then the lover of the great post-impressionist Augustine John. He will be attracted by her wild unrestrainedness, her by his lavish poetic talent. They will get married in 1937, and in a marriage marked by arguments, drunkenness, narcotics, adoration, adulterous affairs, they will live until Dilen's death.
"Our story was a story of drunkenness, not a love story like a million others. Our only and true love was alcohol, and the bar was our altar", Kathleen would later write in the autobiographical book "Kathleen: Life with Dylan Thomas".
In 1936, "Between Two Drunks" from Dylan's pen, a second poetry collection with the characteristic title "25 Poems" will be published, literary criticism will welcome it with praises: "The work of this young poet (he is 23 years old) is of large scale and in terms of subject matter structure - his themes are the mysteries and sanctity of all forms and types of life. He tells of the brotherhood of man and the mineral and vegetable world" - Edith Sitwell, "Sandey Times", 1936.
At the beginning of 1940, Dylan will publish the autobiographical work "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog", paraphrasing the title of James Joyce and his novel "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog". This pseudo-novel or collection of short stories will be singled out by literary critics as one of Dilen's most important works.
Immediately after the war - during the war days his muse was mostly silent - Dylan established a fruitful collaboration with the BBC, writing hundreds of scripts for radio dramas. Tens and tens of thousands of residents of the Kingdom, until recently accustomed to the apocalyptic "howls" of German Messerschmitts, now night after night enjoy the sonorous voices of the leading ladies and directors of London theaters, who "revive" Dylan's characters with great skill. During those years, Dylan Thomas himself brilliantly demonstrated his magnificent performance talent - acting, radio - not lagging behind even Orson Welles.
At the end of 1948, the Thomas couple definitely moved out of London and went to the town of Loghorn, assuming the hustle and bustle of the big city and the London spleen, the idyll of the dreamy town and the picturesqueness of the Welsh landscape. During the "Loghorn days", he will publish the collection of poems "U seosko snu" (1952) with the famous villanelle dedicated to his dying father "Don't go quietly into that good night", "Collected songs", but also experience a fateful visit.
...In January 1950, "visitor one - nothing more", John Malcolm Brinin, will knock on the door of the Thomases' home, bringing to the Thomases' painstakingly created oasis, Poe's "The Raven", Dylan's favorite song and an offer that is hard to refuse. He offered him a multi-week tour of the US, from the east coast to the west coast, with high fees for poetry performances. Dylan gladly accepted the offer, he chronically pocketed money, already on his first American tour setting the standards for future rock-n-roll concerts: thousands of fans on their feet welcomed their idol, reacting violently to his rude gesture, while Dylan, naked to the point of nerves, with an excess of maligan in his blood, masterfully recited his verses.
Thomas will visit the United States three more times, but the two last tours - in the spring of 1953 and in the fall of the same year - are particularly memorable.
The story of the third, penultimate tour of Dylan Thomas is in a way the story of his last masterpiece, the radio drama "Under the Milk Tree", which Dylan finished in the first version in April 1953, traveling with it to the USA. On May XNUMXrd, I performed it in front of an audience at Harvard as a complete work, a marvelous amalgam of oratorios, poems and plays.
On his return to Wales, Thomas spends the summer diligently refining the radio drama with what one might call a "death rush". He then sends the refined text to the BBC, and in October 1953 he flies "across the pond" on a journey of no return.
The centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas in his hometown of Swansea in South Wales was marked by a series of exhibitions, lectures, panel discussions, and theater performances. Thousands of the poet's fans, from all over the world, visited the humble poet's grave in Loghorn, reciting over it, like a mantra, Dylan's magnificent verse: "And no death shall have power".
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