Five Fascinating Facts about Dylan Thomas

Interesting facts about the life and work of Dylan Thomas

1. Dylan Thomas was born in Dylan Marlais Thomas, in Swansea, in 1914. His middle name was Marlais, which was a nod to his great-uncle, William Thomas, who was also a poet. William Thomas’s bardic name was Gwilym Marles.

2. One of Thomas’s first published poems was apparently plagiarised. Thomas took the poem, ‘His Requiem’, from a magazine called the Boy’s Own Paper and, er, republished it in the Western Mail under his own name four years later. This act of literary theft wasn’t discovered for 40 years. As Jeff Towns writes on the blog site of the Dylan Thomas Society, ‘It was some 40 years later that the theft came to light when his friend Daniel Jones included the poem in his new edition of Thomas’ Poems [Dent 1971]. The daughter of the true author – Lilian Gard, happened to…