The Person Behind The Poet

by Dish Staff

Dylan Thomas reads his poem “Lament”:

Rowan Williams appreciates that Hilly Janes’ The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas rises above the “element of caricature” so common in depictions of the poet:

For so many male readers, [Thomas] is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over: the young Dylan, with his off-the-peg Bohemianism, his obscure, symbolically coded resentments, his wild and frustrated sexuality, can look, to the literary (male) adult, like the fearful caricature of a half-forgotten self. …

Which is where Hilly Janes’s book comes as a welcome refreshment. No one is likely to publish a biography of Thomas demonstrating that he was a monogamous and placid soul who could hold his drink and manage his money. But Janes simply sets him in the context of a group of variously gifted Welsh friends and gives some sense of how and why – exasperating as he undoubtedly was – he retained their love and (intermittently) tolerance. The remarkable circle that met in Swansea’s Kardomah Café in the late 1930s was in no sense an echo chamber for Thomas’s ego. These men – Fred Janes (as Alfred was known to family and friends), Daniel Jones, Vernon Watkins, among others – were deeply serious artists, prolific, thoughtful, and self-critical. … In other words, here is Dylan Thomas in conversation with those he thought of as peers.