Broadcast date and place: 8/03/1947, BBC series The Poet and his critic

Extract: It is difficult for a poet to talk about his own poetry, unless he has finished with it or it has finished with him. his own early work may seem to him remote from what he is trying to do now; he may re-read it, with uneasy enjoyment or distaste, as calmly, he thinks, as he would of a contemporary dead man; but every now and then a line or a phrase or a whole passage, not necessarily, by any means, the most effective or memorable, springs from the page and attacks him in its origin.

Further information:This was part of a series called The Poet and his Critic. Dylan’s critic was T.W.Earp.

Broadcast date and place: 15/06/1947, BBC home services

Extract: It was a cold whit day on High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbles with snow and headstoned with fences. Dogs, delicate as cats on water, as though they had gloves on their paws, padded over the vanished buildings.

Further information: Dylan wrote and read this script about his search of a blitzed Swansea for the his childhood places and the boy he once was.

Broadcast date and place: 14/02/1948, BBC series Books and Authors

Extract: The condition of the world is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be comic about it. (Was the world ever such that they could?) Perhaps they say: Can we single out the amiably comic eccentricity of individual beings, the ludicrous, the gauche, the maximise gawky, the dear and the draft and the droll, the runcible Booby, the Toby, the Pickwick, the barmy old Adam, when daily we are confronted, as social beings, by the dolt and the peeve and the mine and the bully, the maniac new atom? I prefer the attitude of Pepys: 12th Friday. Up, finding our beds good, but lousy; which made us merry.

Further information: This is a conversation with Arthur Calder-Marshall.

Broadcast date and place: 30/07/1948, BBC Third programme

Extract: There is, in many people, a need to share enthusiasm, which is often expressed in behaviour known, nicely, as ‘showing off’; common to actors, poets, politicians and other trapezists. Many people who read poems like some of them so much that they cannot keep their liking to themselves. They are not content with saying, ‘Do you know de la Eliot’s “Waste Stranger” or WH Houseman’s “A Dog Beneath the Gallows”. Isn’t it, or aren’t they, lovely?’ But they needs must say, ‘Listen to this,’ and reel the lovely stuff off aloud.

Further information: This was a journalistic piece on an amateur recitation of poetry competition held in London.

Broadcast date and place: 23/06/1949, BBC Scottish Region

Extract: But all this was easy stuff…what was harder to remember was what birds sounded like and said in Gower; what sort of a sound and a shape was Carmarthen Bay; how did the morning come in through the windows of Solva; what silence when night fell in the Aeron Valley. I could not remember, try as I might.

Further information: Dylan gave a talk on the subject of returning to live in Wales.

Broadcast date and place: 29/07/1949, BBC Welsh Home Service

Extract:I do not know how much of a Welshman Edward Thomas was, and it does not matter. He was a poet, which means that he is a poet still, and always will be, whether in the future he is read or not, or whether no poems at all are read, or whether, because of the powerful insanity of rulers and the apathy or persecution of the innumerable ruled, there is nobody left to read them.

Further information: Dylan chose and commented on a selection of Edward Thomas poems.

Broadcast date and place: 24/09/1949, BBC Third Programme

Extract: To choose what I should read tonight, I looked through seventy odd poems of mine, and found that many are odd indeed and that some may be poems. And I decided not to choose those that strike me, still, as pretty peculiar, but to stick to a few of the ones that do move a little way towards the state and destination I imagine I intended to be theirs when, in small rooms in Wales, arrogantly and devotedly I began them.

Further information: Dylan read a selection of his own poems, with commentary. He read: There Was a Saviour, If my Head Hurt a Hair’s Foot, Poem in October, After the Funeral, A Refusal to Mourn and In My Craft or Sullen Art.

Broadcast date and place: 24/10/1949, Welsh Home Service

Extract: Three writers, a painter, and a composer, have come together – in a suburb of Swansea where maybe once a sweeter life hayseed in the old gold dodges – to talk about (more or less) how they regard the town of their birth or upbringing as a place in which to do their work.

Further information: Dylan made a broadcast with his Swansea friends, the musician Dan Jones, the artist Alfred Janes and poets Vernon Watkins and John Pritchard.

Broadcast date and place: 25/09/1950, BBC Third Programme

Extract: A miscellaneous writer, such as myself, who is prepared to sit in front of this cold utensil and talk, in public confidence, about his new long unwritten poem, deserves to be a successful man-of-letters. I used to think that once a writer became a man-of-letters, if only for half an hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, peril. Perhaps after this I shall become transformed into establishment, all my own doubts and worries will be over, I need bother my head about nothing except birth, death, sex, money, politics, and religion, and, jowled and wigged, aloof as a bloodhound, I may summon my former literary delinquency before me and give it a long, periodic sentence.

Further information: Dylan read three poems – In Country Sleep, Over Sir John’s Hill and In the White Giant’s Thigh.

Broadcast date and place: 13/12/1950, BBC Home Service

Broadcast script:Dylan Thomas: Would it be true to say about bad verse that it’s bad just as people are bad? It’s bad because it is pretending to be something that it isn’t? It’s a kind of snob of a poem; or it’s lazy and vague and woolly and sloppy and wet? It’s a sentimentalist of a poem,or it’s long-winded, vaporous, without any humour, and it’s swollen up with itself. It’s a bore of a poem.

Further information: Dylan hosted a discussion about ‘Bad Poetry’ with George Baker, Roy Campbell and W.R.Rodgers.

Broadcast date and place: 17/04/1951, BBC Home Service

Extract: And there was nothing on that hot and hateful bone-dry blistering bank but some dates that nobody kept, and a few lizards who had nowhere else to go or, if they had, would not recognize it. And some jackals, I suppose, full of guilt and a vague sense of ill-being, howling at the Euphrates and waiting for man.

Further information: This script was based on Dylan’s experiences of his visit to Iran.

Broadcast date and place: 19/06/1951, Welsh Home Service

Extract: The extent of the site of the exhibition on the South Bank of the Thames in the heart of London is four and a half acres. There are twenty-two pavilions in the Exhibitions and thirteen restaurants, cafés, bars and buffets.

Further information: This talk was about the festival exhibition at the South Bank in London.

Broadcast date and place: 23/01/1955, BBC Third Programme

Extract: The collection of short free-verse poems called Spoon River Anthology written by Edgar Lee Masters, a Chicago lawyer, was published in 1915 when he was forty-five years old; and it shocked the American public so profoundly that it sold a great number of copies.

Further information: Dylan wrote but dod not give this talk. It was given, after his death, on the 23 January 1955 and presented by Barbara Kelly and Bernard Braden.

Broadcast date and place: 09/04/1953,

Extract: Dylan Thomas: It was a terrible long time ago, as is only too obvious. Before Television – (I’m glad I’m not looking at television tonight, between a quarter-to-eight and a quarter-past-nine. There’s faces you’ll see, they tell me). Before the radio even, I shouldn’t be surprised, when I see that dewy blubber lipped frog-eyed mock goblin from the Welsh bogs goggling at me out of the past. (I think that portrait must have been losing weight; I can hardly recognize it now). before the internal-combustion engine, before the invention of the wheel, oh what a long time ago, in the Golden Days.

Further information: This was filmed for TV and included Dylan’s Swansea friends, Vernon Watkins, Alfred Janes and Daniel Jones.

Broadcast date and place: 13/07/1953, BBC Welsh Home Service

Extract:Llangollen. A town in a vale in rolling green North Wales on a windy July morning. The sun squints out and is puffed back again into the grey clouds blowing, full to the ragged rims with rain, across the Berwyn Hills. The white-horsed River Dee hisses and paws over the hills of its stones and under the greybeard bridge. Wind smacks the river and you, it’s a cold, cracking morning: birds hang and rasp over the whipped river, against their will, as though frozen still, or are wind-chaffed and scattered towards the gusty trees.

Further information: This based on Dylan’s week at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen.

Broadcast date and place: 30/03/1954, BBC Welsh Home Service

Extract: Across the United States of America, from New York to California and back, glazed, again, for many months of the year there streams and sings for its heady supper a dazed and prejudiced procession of European lecturers, scholars, sociologists, economist, writers, authorities on this and that and even, in theory, on the United States of America.

Further information: This was a script Dylan wrote about his trips touring America in the 1950s.

Broadcast date and place: 05/11/1953, BBC Welsh Home Service

Extract: Off and on, up and down, high and dry, man and boy, I’ve been living now for fifteen years, or centuries, in this timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town, in this far, forgetful, important place of herons, cormorants (known here as billyduckers), castle, churchyard, gulls, ghost, geese, feuds, scares, scandals, cherry-trees, mysteries, jackdaws in the chimneys, bats in the belfry, skeletons in the cupboards, pubs, mud, cockles, flatfish, curlews, rain, and human, often all too human, beings; and, though still very much a foreigner, I am hardly ever stoned in the streets any more, and can claim to be able to call several of the inhabitants, and a few of the herons, by their Christian names.

Further information: This talk was broadcast in Laugharne in front of a live audience including Dylan’s wife Caitlin. Just before this broadcast, Caitlin was told that Dylan was seriously ill in an American hospital.