Thirteen of his first collection 18 Poems came from the latest notebook (August 1933) and approximately half of the poems of his second and third collections, Twenty-five Poems and The Map of Love had their origin in these notebooks. Dylan typed out his notebook poems when he was ready to submit them to publishers; about eight of these early typescripts, some of which fill gaps in the notebooks, have found there way into the British Library and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Texas.

By the age of 20, Dylan had already written first drafts of two thirds of his later published poetry. He furiously scribbled notes, ideas, words and phrases into his adolescent notebooks. He was a perfectionist and it could take him days, weeks, months and years to write a poem. He would pin large white pieces of cardboard to the wall to see the whole of his story or poem in progress and there were piles of discarded pieces of paper on the floor. As well as observing how his poetry evolves you can see: word lists, drawings, rhyme schemes, cigarette burns, crossings out, coffee stains, annotations, doodles, under linings, use of coloured pencil, ink blots and practice signatures. Each poem is dated, numbered and a few are simply called ‘Pome’.

The notebooks truly confirm his friend Bert Trick’s words.

“To read Dylan, either prose or his poetry, and especially as he read it, which flowed out in a lovely stream of words, you would think that these words, and these sentence build ups, came easy to him – but they didn’t. They were the result of meticulous craftsmanship.”

His writing routine began after breakfast of ‘an apple, an orange, and a banana’. He would take a look at the newspaper in bed, then come downstairs for a couple of hours reading, and then he walked to the nearby Uplands Hotel for a couple of pints of beer, returning home for an afternoon’s writing.

Dylan sold his notebooks in the 1940s. He wrote to Bertram Rota, the bookseller, and explained that he was interested in selling them. Rota went to Buffalo University. No one had ever asked the library for payment for manuscripts of this kind before, in fact, to discourage any deliberate manufacturing of worksheets; the librarian had made it a rule never to pay. Charles Abbot, librarian of the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo, New York wrote in a letter in September 1941 – “Persuaded a private friend to buy them for us. It is a transaction which is most unlikely to occur again”. The four notebooks were bought for £6, £7.10, £6.10, and £5, respectively.

I’ve been acting on and off – mostly off – both as an amateur and a vague professional since I was the size of your thumb… My speciality is the playing of mad men, neurotics, nasty ‘modern’ young men and low comedians – quite straight acting.
(Letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson – 1933)

It was Dylan’s gift as a performer, both of his poetry and prose, that helped ensure the success of his poetry. It was during his early years that he truly learnt his trade. His earliest known role was in a Christmas play at his primary school,  when he was given the part of the colonel; but at Swansea Grammar School Dylan became a member of the debating, dramatic and reading societies. His successes in these areas were no doubt helped by his previous elocution lessons; he was able to perfectly project his voice and win debates using humour. A review of his acting abilities appeared in the school magazine “D.M Thomas gave a good performance as Oliver Cromwell, in spite of the fact that physically he was not up to the part… he looked as young and fresh and clean as if he had just come off the cover of a chocolate box.” Whilst still at school, Dylan joined the YMCA Junior Players and took part in a series of plays. One production was about two men in the world, and all the rest were women.

He later joined the Swansea Little Theatre (who now perform at the Dylan Thomas Theatre), alongside his sister Nancy. He took acting very seriously and worked very hard, as did the whole group. A friend Thomas Taig comments, “It was an amateur company with a difference, because amongst this company were a number of people with professional experience… they were unpaid professionals really”. In the six months between October 1933 and March 1934 he, and the others, learnt, rehearsed, and put on five productions in the theatre at Mumbles, each running for several nights, and at least nine touring performances of Upstream and The Way of the World. The Little Theatre was as much about friendship as performance, and there were many social activities as well.

Dylan’s first biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon also suggests that Dylan may have occasionally worked as an extra at the Grand Theatre in Swansea, and that, in the spring of 1934, he considered applying for a job with the Coventry Repertory Company.

This talented group of school friends attended Swansea Grammar at the same time. They would often meet in the Kardomah Café on Castle Street in Swansea and were joined by other artists, musicians and poets during the 1930s. Regulars included poets Charles Fisher, Dylan Thomas, John Prichard, musician Daniel Jones, artists Alfred Janes, Mervyn Levy, Mabley Owen and Tom Warner. Mainly boys buts sometimes joined by Evelyn (Titch) Phillips and her sister Vera. The poet Vernon Watkins, Dylan’s friend and mentor joined them, though this was later as he first met Dylan in 1935. Before it became a café, it was the chapel where Dylan’s parents, D.J. and Florrie, got married.

In February 1941, Swansea was heavily bombed in a ‘Three Nights Blitz’. Unfortunately the original Café, was destroyed, however it reopened after the war in a new location.

There were also other regular weekly meetings. On Wednesday nights a group met at Dylan’s house, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, where they would use Dylan’s father’s study. Dylan’s mother would bring sandwiches and cocoa. When his father returned from the pub at closing time the group would go upstairs, to Dylan’s room to continue talking, or to hear what he had been writing. On Sunday afternoons and evenings (until the early hours of Monday morning) they went to Bert Trick’s house at 69 Glanbrydan Avenue, where there were readings and music. Mrs Trick would give them sandwiches, sweet jellies and cakes. The permanent group included: Bert Trick, Nell Trick, Dylan Thomas, Fred Janes, Tom Warner, John Jennings, and then sometimes Charles Fisher, Gwyn Thomas, Gilbert Evans and on a few rare occasions Dan Jones.

“A candle in the thighs, Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age”

The Listener was the literary body of the BBC and letters began to arrive at the Corporation’s office complaining that the BBC had published an obscene poem. They were forced to make a public apology. It was only after the Second World War that the BBC truly forgave Dylan Thomas and his great talents on air were recognised. T.S. Eliot having seen this poem wrote to Dylan.

When the Referee published Dylan’s poem, ‘That Sanity Be Kept‘, in September 1933, an intense correspondence began. Dylan’s letters to Pamela provide the most vivid and detailed accounts of his life, and thoughts, at the time and give us illuminating glimpses of the growth of the young poet’s mind and sensibility. They also set out formative attitudes and concepts. He poured out his heart and soul. The full correspondence with Pamela was more than fifty thousand words and half of the letters were written before they met in February 1934. The letters are now in the Lockwood Library of New York, Buffalo University.

During 1934, Dylan made trips to London to visit her, the first being in February. Pamela describes his visit in her diary.

He was very small and light. Under a raincoat with bulging pockets, one of which contained a quarter bottle of brandy, another a crumpled mass of poems and stories, he wore a grey-necked sweater, and a small pair of trousers that still looked much too big on him. He had the body of a boy of fourteen. When he took of his pork-pie hat (which, he also told me later, was what he decided poets wore) he revealed a large and remarkable head, not shaggy – for he was visiting – but heavy with hair the dull gold of threepenny bits springing in deep waves and curls from a precise middle parting.

Their literary friendship then became a brief love affair and although Dylan proposed to her (she refused) their relationship seemed to slowly dissolve after Pamela and her mother stayed in Swansea in September 1934. Unfortunately, the weather was appalling. They also discovered that Dylan was only nineteen. He had told Pamela he was twenty-one. Pamela became a novelist and later married Lord CP Snow.

In August 1933, he went to visit his sister in Chertsey. During that visit, he saw the editor of New English Weekly and, as a result, they published his stories a few months later. He also saw Sir Richard Rees the editor of Adelphi. Rees accepted a poem ‘No Man Believes When A Star Falls‘ and published it in the next edition of the magazine. This was a vital experience for Dylan as he discovered which magazines and papers might publish his poems, and he had at least a whiff of the literary atmosphere in the capital.

I am spending Whitsun in the strangest town in Wales. Laugharne, with a population of four hundred, has a town hall, a castle, and a portreeve. The people speak with a broad English accent, although on all sides they are surrounded by hundreds of miles of Welsh country. The neutral sea lies at the foot of the town, and Richard Hughes writes his cosmopolitan stories in the castle. (Extract from a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson)

In spring 1935 interest began to grow and The Spectator, New Verse and Times Literary Supplement all published favourable reviews. It was more than enough to launch a poet. It was further helped a few months later in February 1936 when Edith Sitwell positively reviewed it in the London Mercury. This was a pleasant surprise, as two years previously she had been very disparaging about Dylan’s poem, ‘Our Eunuch Dreams‘. Soon afterwards, his second collection Twenty-five Poems were published. Edith became a friend and advocate for Dylan for the rest of his life.

During this period, Dylan learnt how to network with the great, the artistic and the literary. His poems and stories appeared in literary magazines and papers, and he became a well-known poet.

During the summer and autumn of that year his reputation as a poet grew as more and more of his poems were published in New Verse, the Criterion, the Delphi and elsewhere. He was selling his short stories too and doing some reviewing for the Adelphi and working for the Morning Post. 18 Poems was published on December 18th 1934.

I’m ten miles from the nearest human being (with the exception of the deaf farmer who gives me food), and, in spite of the sea and the lakes and my papers and my books and my cigarettes (although they’re damned hard to get, and I’ve few left of them) and my increasing obsession with the things under the skin, I’m lonely as Christ sometimes and can’t even speak to my Father on an ethereal wave-length. I came here – ‘here’ is a cottage studio, once owned by an American artist, perched in a field on a hill facing a l0t of wild Atlantic – with Geoffrey G. (Grigson), but he’s gone back to town. And here is a wild, unlettered and unfrenchlettered country, too far from Ardara, a village you can’t be too far from. Here are gannets and seals and puffins flying and puffing and playing a quarter of a mile outside my window where there are great rocks petrified like the old fates and destinies of Ireland & smooth, white pebbles under and around them like the souls of the dead Irish. There’s a hill with a huge echo; you shout, and the dead Irish answer from behind the hill…..

…My days these days are planned out carefully, or at least conveniently, to the clock I haven’t got (if time is the tick of a clock, I’m living in a funny dimension, in an hourless house): I rise at nine, I breakfast and clean up till ten, I read or write from ten till one, I lunch at one, then I walk over the cliffs to the sea and stay or walk about there till half past three or four, then tea, after tea I write until the early dusk, then I climb over the hills to the high lakes and fish there until dark. Back. Supper. Bed. I have a little illegal poteen whiskey with my supper, and I smoke black shag in a bad pipe. One day a week I shall walk ten miles to Glendrumatie where there is a shop and a porter bar. It rains and it rains.
(from a letter to Bert Trick, summer 1935)

Caitlin, whose name rhymes with Catkin, was born on December 8th 1913. Her father, Francis Macnamara was an Irish man from Ennistymon, County Clare and her mother, Yvonne (nee Majolier) was half Irish, half French. They had two daughters and a son before Caitlin was born, in London. They moved in artistic and literary circles and one of their close friends was Augustus John, who later introduced Caitlin and Dylan. Shortly after Caitlin’s birth, her parents separated, and later divorced. Yvonne took the children to live near Ringwood in Hampshire. Caitlin spent most of her childhood in Hampshire but also visited her father in Ireland. Francis could only afford to send £300 to the family per year so there was not enough money for the girls to be sent away to school. They were educated at home by a series of mademoiselles. She did, in her teens, spend a few terms at an academy for young ladies near Bournemouth.

Dylan and Caitlin had a temperamental relationship, which has been widely noted. It was fiery and full of arguments and there were infidelities, on both sides. However, what has sometimes not been recognised, is the positive influence Caitlin had on Dylan, and the sacrifices she made for his art. Caitlin had learned to dance in a free-style way, in the manner of Isadora Duncan, and was a chorus girl at the London Palladium and in Paris. After meeting Dylan, she became a homemaker and provided Dylan with the routine and stability he needed to help him focus on his writing. Later when living in Laugharne Caitlin insisted that Dylan stay in his writing shed from two until seven. She would even lock the door (her contribution to his literary output) and he seemed to accept this. She had a strong need for physical exercise and swam or walked long distances frequently, as well as taking every opportunity to soak up the sun, not always available in West Wales. She continued to dance, publically in the pubs at night, but also privately at home.

Caitlin was somewhat of a ‘free-spirit’ and was not always concerned about conforming to what was considered ‘appropriate’ behaviour, often much to her young daughter’s horror.

“ When Mother realized that no one ever visited the lawn except us, she used to slip off her suit to swim with nothing on. I would object loudly, imagining eyes peering from all the bushes growing across the cliff-face”

“ Mother was fond of a canary-yellow quilt skirt which made a circle when she pirouetted. On walks she would cartwheel, her skirt like a glorious waist ruff. One woman remembered her striding down the main street wearing a black velvet skirt with a white blouse: ‘not at all what we were used to…she commented ‘very striking though…’”

After Dylan’s death Caitlin moved to Italy and lived there for about forty years. After she died in 1994, she was brought back to Wales, at her request, to be buried with Dylan in Laugharne.

“Curls thatched his head and a Bohemian poetry tie flowed down and out below his soft collar.”

His style became one of self-expression and was indicative of the persona he was presenting to the world. The idea of the doomed, young poet was also vital and he talked often about having ‘galloping consumption’. His friend, Rayner Heppenstall, describes an evening in London with Dylan. “As we went out into the cold Dylan began to cough and spit. He looked down at his spittle in the roadway and said: ‘blood, boy! That’s the stuff.’”

Over the years, there have been many conflicting stories about Dylan’s behaviour in the pubs and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia and one of the reasons for this could be what his friend Gwen Watkins referred to it as, ‘Instant Dylan’. He took on a chameleon-like approach and adapted his ‘performance’ accordingly. Glyn Jones remembers his changing behaviour well. “…He was inclined to take on the atmosphere of the company that he was in. I’ve heard him myself condemn opinions or actions in one group of people, and then when he goes into another group, whose atmosphere is different, he would then not condemn, but praise this…”

Dylan also had a wonderful knack of making anybody feel that they had known him all their lives. Except, they had not.

I am tortured by every doubt and misgiving that an hereditarily twisted imagination, an hereditary thirst and commercial quenching, a craving for a body not my own, a chequered education and too much egocentric poetry, and a wild, wet day in a tided town, are capable of conjuring up out of their helly deeps… (Extract of a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, May 1933)

According to John Malcolm Brinnin when describing Dylan in America, he commented that, more than once, Dylan said that he thought he had seen the gates of hell. This letter shows that he had seen them much earlier. It seems to suggest that Dylan was at breaking point and it was a cry for help. When Glyn Jones met Dylan around that time, he said, “I was struck by his extreme awareness, his sensitiveness and response to every subtle change of mood and direction in our talk.” This was made worse by Dylan’s father’s diagnosis of throat cancer in August 1933 and the painful treatment that followed. The dread and uneasy atmosphere at Cwmdonkin Drive was having a very negative impact on Dylan. Dylan was unable to switch off from work and he was struggling with insomnia. His friend Constantine Fitzgibbon believes that Dylan had a nervous breakdown of sorts in November 1933. There is a parallel between his frame of mind in 1933 and the description of Dylan as he was during his last days in New York. Ironically, Dylan was writing furiously at this time and thirteen poems of his first collection, 18 Poems , came from the latest notebook that was started in August 1933.

It was in 1931, the bitterest year of the Depression in Wales, and the years of severe poverty and unemployment when Dylan was a journalist and saw its effects, especially in some of the dockside pubs.

…I think a great deal can be made of the fact that, in the very short period when Dylan was a reporter on the Evening Post he certainly absorbed, in that period, a tremendous feeling for Swansea, particularly the seamier side of Swansea, down in dockland, which in those days was a pretty rough quarter.(A.E (Bert) Trick – Swansea Labour party man to whom Thomas dedicated his poem, ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper’.”)

Though his poetry was not usually politically driven, Dylan’s views were generally regarded as quite left wing. Augustus John said, “like so many of his generation, he discovered in himself a fellow-feeling for the under dog; and though never really a political poet he remained firmly and steadfastly on the left, unlike many contemporary English poets of the thirties”. Many believe that his socialism was owed more to his experience of the Depression in Wales than to Marxism. According to his first biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon, when he got to London he met a number of communists but he often did not like their views. In 1934, Geoffrey Grigson circulated a New Verse questionnaire with a question about political views. This is how Dylan answered.

“I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of man from man and the sources of production at man’s disposal, for only through such an essentially revolutionary body can there be the possibility of a communal art.”