Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world.


His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.

Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.


My Hero Bares His Nerves


My hero bares his nerves along my wrist That rules from wrist to shoulder,Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,Leans on my mortal ruler,The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull Ache on the lovelorn paper I hug to love with my unruly scrawl That utters all love hunger And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart Tread, like a naked Venus,The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;Stripping my loin of promise,He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from the box of nerves Praising the mortal error Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,And the hunger's emperor;He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.