The poet lived a rock star life, i suppose i can se am getting drunk all the time and being at big partis. If you actually look at what dillantons did, you see a thousand pages of letters. You see 500 pages of film scripts. You see 200 pages of poetry. This is a man who worked relentlessly. He knew how to socialize, obviously, but didn't spend most of his time doing that,. otherwise he would produced what he did. The fact that he was a craftsman and yet had this public image is really interesting.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953). He wrote some of his best poems before he was twenty in the first half of his short, remarkable life, and was prolific in the second half too with poems such as those set in London under the Blitz and reworkings of his childhood in Swansea, and his famous radio play Under Milk Wood (performed after his death). He was read widely and widely heard: with his reading tours in America and recordings of his works that sold in their hundreds of thousands after his death, he is credited with reviving the act of poetry as performance in the 20th century.
With
Nerys Williams
Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at University College Dublin
John Goodby
Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University
And
Leo Mellor
The Roma Gill Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson