Dylan Thomas

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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Nerys Williams No other episodes
  Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at University College Dublin
• John Goodby No other episodes
  Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University
• Leo Mellor No other episodes
  The Roma Gill Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

Reading list

• Reading Dylan Thomas
  Edward Allen (ed.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) Google Books →
• Reading Dylan Thomas
  Ned Allen (ed.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) Google Books →
• New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas: "A writer of words, and nothing else"?
  Rhian Barfoot and Kieron Smith (eds.) (University of Wales Press, 2020) Google Books →
• The Growth of Under Milk Wood
  Douglas Cleverdon (New Directions, 1969) Google Books →
• Dylan Thomas's Swansea, Gower and Laugharne
  James A. Davies (University of Wales Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Dylan Thomas: Writers of Wales
  Walford Davies (University of Wales Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Dylan Thomas: Open Guides to Literature
  Walford Davies (Open University Press, 1986) Google Books →
• Dylan Remembered, Volume 1: 1914-1934
  Colin Edwards (ed. David N. Thomas) (Seren Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Dylan Remembered, Volume 2: 1935-1953
  Colin Edwards (ed. David N. Thomas) (Seren Press, 2004) Google Books →
• The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall
  John Goodby (Liverpool University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas
  John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne (eds.) (Bloomsbury, 2020)
• The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas
  Hilly Janes (Parthian, 2014) Google Books →
• Apocalypse: An Anthology
  James Keery (ed.) (Carcanet, 2020) Google Books →
• Dylan Thomas: A New Life
  Andrew Lycett (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003) Google Books →
• Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture
  Leo Mellor (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Google Books →
• Surrealism in Britain
  Michel Remy (Routledge, 1999) Google Books →
• War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties
  Andrew Sinclair (Faber, 2009) Google Books →
• The Broadcasts
  Dylan Thomas (ed. Ralph Maud) (J. M. Dent, 1991) Google Books →
• The Collected Poems
  Dylan Thomas (ed. John Goodby) (Orion, 2016) Google Books →
• The Collected Letters
  Dylan Thomas (ed. Paul Ferris) (J. M. Dent, 2000) Google Books →
• Under Milk Wood
  Dylan Thomas (Orion, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m001882k

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001882k

Auto-category: 821.912 (English poetry–20th century)