The Welsh Bard
It’s the birthday of Dylan Thomas born in Swansea, Wales (1914). The name Dylan was an extremely rare name at the time of his birth. His father found the name in a collection of old Welsh folk tales. Today, Dylan is one of the top 20 most popular names for boys in the United States.
…he had an extraordinarily deep, sonorous reading voice…
Thomas kept a notebook for his poems as a teenager, and he continued to borrow lines and even whole poems from that notebook for his entire career. Almost every poem he wrote as an adult had an early version in that original notebook, written when he was 18 years old.
He made his name among general readers with the poems he wrote about the bombing raids on London During World War II, including “Ceremony After a Fire Raid,” “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”
Once he’d become famous, he spent most of his time going on reading tours, especially in the United States, where he could make the money he needed to support his family. He had an extraordinarily deep, sonorous reading voice, and people came in droves to listen to him read his own poetry as well as the poetry of others. In the last eight years of his life, Thomas wrote only eight poems. He died on his last reading tour of the United States in 1953.
From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
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