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The date was chosen to commemorate the premiere of Dylan Thomas’ play Under Milk Wood. That production took place in 1953 at the 92Y Poetry Center.
According to the press release, the organization hopes “to make it an annual celebration of Thomas’ life and work.” The program for this year’s celebration includes “a #DylanDay Twitter campaign,” the Dylan’s Great Poem online initative, “the first public viewing of Dylan Thomas’ recently discovered ‘lost notebook.'” and “performances throughout the United Kingdom.”
Today, 27 October sees the centenary of the birth of the poet, Dylan Marlais Thomas. Born on Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, and brought up in the genteel district of Uplands, Thomas’s childhood was suburban and orthodox — his father an aspirational but disappointed English teacher at the local grammar school.
Swansea would remain a place for home comforts. But from the mid-1930s, Thomas began a wandering life that took in London’s Fitzrovia — and in particular its pubs, the Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf — and then (as a dysfunctionally married man) the New Forest, squalid rooms in wartime London, New Quay on Cardigan Bay, Italy, Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, and from 1950 the United States where he gained a popular student following and where he died in Manhattan, aged thirty-nine.
For all his wanderings, few of Thomas’s poems were written outside Wales. Indeed, half of the published poems for which he is known were written, in some form, while he was living at home in Swansea between 1930 and 1934. As Paul Ferris, his Oxford DNB biographer writes, “commonplace scenes and characters from childhood recur in his writing: the park that adjoins Cwmdonkin Drive; the bay and sands that were visible from the windows; a maternal aunt he visited” — the latter giving rise to one of Thomas’s best-known poems, “Fern Hill.” In literary London, and in numerous bar rooms thereafter, Thomas’s “drinking and clowning were indispensable to him, but they were only half the story; ‘I am as domestic as a slipper’ he once observed, with some truth.”
Dylan Thomas, “Was there a time” by Biccie. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
On 27th October 1914 Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, South Wales. He is widely regarded as one the most significant Welsh writers of the 20th century.Thomas’s popular reputation has continued to grow after his death on 9th November, 1953, despite some critics describing his work as too ‘florid‘. He wrote prolifically throughout his lifetime but is arguably best known for his poetry. His poem The hand that signed the paper is taken from Jon Stallworthy’s edited collection The Oxford Book of War Poetry, and can be found below:
DYLAN THOMAS
1914–1953
The hand that signed the paper
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Statue of Dylan Thomas, Maritime Quarter, Swansea, by Tony in Devon. CC-BY-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
I recently visited the Boathouse in Laugharne. I'd been there before, and peered into Dylan Thomas' Writing Shed, but this time I was with my friend, the artist Julia Griffiths Jones http://www.juliagriffithsjones.co.uk, and she'd been inside! She had been allowed to go into the shed to draw. When she showed me the drawings that she had made there, and the photographs that she had taken, I must admit to being gripped by a strange excitement and considerable envy. There is something about the place where a writer works that exerts a peculiar fascination. Just to see what he or she had on the desk by way of distraction or because a particular object was special in some way; to see the pictures pinned up on the wall; the view, or lack of it from the window. These things serve to bring alive some of the process of mind that produced the work that one admires.
In Dylan Thomas' writing shed - Julia Griffiths-Jones
What I found especially wonderful here was the sheet of paper, stained and wrinkled, crisped by time, that was covered in lists and lists of words. Dylan Thomas is famous for the lyrical precision of his poetry, the startling originality of his images, the sheer exuberance of the words he chooses. He once said that his first introduction to poetry was through nursery rhymes:
I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance.
17 Comments on Sheds - Celia Rees, last added: 5/17/2012
I have a shed - brick built, with a flat, leaking concrete roof, full of spiders and junk. I shan't be cleaning it out. And I have a room of my own - so full of clutter I'm resistant to tidying that I've been forced out. I only use it when I need the printer. I write on my laptop in a corner of the sofa. I don't have any shed-envy - but then, I don't have to share my house. I can imagine there would be trouble and strife if I did.
What an enjoyable and beautifully illustrated piece. Francis is now left with a completely bare concrete base - a tabula rasa if eve I saw one. Meanwhile we have discovered (or been discovered by) the website shedworking which you may well wish to visit yourself - eye-candy for shedfreaks. Personally I plan to return to my attic, as soon as F vacates. http://www.shedworking.co.uk/2012/05/francis-wheens-shed-disaster.html
Oh I would love a shed - or even just a real space of my own. I actually have a whole working life in a corner of my bedroom. It is NOT a good idea but there is nowhere else. I do think though that one should keep a copy of things in a safe and separate place.
This is going to fuel your shed-envy, Celia, but.... This very apt for me at the moment, since at this VERY minute I am waiting for an electrician to arrive to connect electricity to my glorious shed which was installed last week. It's hyper-insulated, incredibly light (east and south facing walls are glass) and all i can see from it are trees and plants (currently rhodies and azaleas in full flower) and I can't wait to write in it! Mostly I am looking for to actually *going* to work, like a proper person.
This is a wonderful post and it was lovely to see all those sheds. Dylan's is superb and I love your artist pal's pictures of it. I have no shed envy whatsoever, though they are super! Happy to work in my study at home. A back bedroom looking out on to the garden. My desk faces the wall, not the window and I have bookshelves all around me and knick nacks of various kinds on the desk. I sometimes move my laptop to the kitchen but not often. Particularly sad to think of poor Francis Wheen, whom I know a little. That is a disaster of huge proportions and I can't begin to think how I'd feel if all my books etc went up in smoke. YOUR space, Celia, looks very good to me! And the main thing is: it produces your work, so you have no complaints! Nor should any other Sassie...if it ain't broke, etc.
Excellent piece of writing. I have added it to the Dylan Thomas Boathouse facebook page, linked below. Hope that's ok! Good to meet you the other week. Jon
Loved this! Wonderful all those pictures of sheds. I am now suffering from a serious case of shed envy... a condition probably suffered only by writers and gardeners.
Linda Newbery said, on 5/16/2012 4:50:00 AM
A lovely post - and I do like Julia Griffitht-Jones' drawings! All this has made me nostalgic for my own rather lovely ex-shed. I would like to think that someone else will use it for writing one day. Though I must say there are advantages to being in the house - especially in freezing weather!
Nicola has fuelled my shed envy and I'm sorry if I triggered a bout of nostalgia, Linda. I'm so excited about the Boathouse having it's own Facebook Page - I've gone off and liked it straight away, I'm glad you liked the piece, Jon. Thanks for the inspiration and the bara brith. Everyone who has heard of Francis' shed disaster, Julia, is full of sorrow and sympathy. Only writers, or artists can know what a loss it must have been. I know it doesn't really matter where we write, but to lose ones things, one's books, above all, one's work must be devastating.
I must be very greedy because I now have shed envy even though I have a delightful study with an extensive attached roof garden overlooking garden and field for working on sunny days. Table and wifi on the roof, too. But I'd still like a Dahlesque shed.
I once saw a wonderful gypsy-style caravan with wood-burning stove that you could have installed in the garden as an office and wanted it desperately, but it was £10,000 and really very unnecessary...
I must be very greedy because I now have shed envy even though I have a delightful study with an extensive attached roof garden overlooking garden and field for working on sunny days. Table and wifi on the roof, too. But I'd still like a Dahlesque shed.
I once saw a wonderful gypsy-style caravan with wood-burning stove that you could have installed in the garden as an office and wanted it desperately, but it was £10,000 and really very unnecessary...
I have a shed/summerhouse which I use sometimes, but will be able to use much more once all my children are at school... just isn't possible to lock myself away in there with 3 and 2 year olds in tow :)
Lovely post, Celia. It is fascinating to see other people's sheds and the things they keep in them to surround them when they are writing. I love my shed. It's called 'Tuscany' and it is amazing how different it feels being inside the shed rather than writing anywhere else. There is a sense of quiet that makes it easy to write, even when the writing is being difficult!
You can see it on a previous ABBA blog here http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/collaborating-or-flying-solo-linda.html
Bit late - but this is such a lovely post, Celia. I love all the shed pics, and love thinking of Dylan Thomas's shed filled with lists of his words. WOW!
I do suffer a little bit from shed envy. There's something so romantic about the idea. However, I have a beautiful attic room with views of the sea for my study, and I adore it so probably wouldn't swap!
Oh, no! I've got attic envy now! Thanks to everyone who responded to this post. It's fascinating to hear about where others write and impossible not to envy some people, but ultimately it's what gets written that matters.
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labor by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.
There was a time when I read more poetry than I do now. I was younger, of course. I got drunk on words, I learned poems easily; I muttered them under my breath while waiting for buses; I repeated them at night – poem after poem - to send myself sliding away on a raft of poetry down a river of dreams. Actually I still do all these things, except that I don’t read so much new poetry anymore, and I find it harder to memorise.
Dylan Thomas’s poems lent themselves to being declaimed aloud. Incantatory. (I suppose being Welsh he knew all about being a bard.) Anyhow, I used to chant them to myself on walks, and even though some of them were pretty obscure – like unutterably amazing crossword puzzle clues – they filled the mouth and rolled out like thunder:
“Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies.”
What did it mean? Who cared? It sounded bloody good. And to be fair, there was plenty of obscure poetry about in the 1970’s when I was reading these things. Almost every glam-rock album could do the mysteriously evocative stuff. Look at early Genesis! I kind of stopped bothering about the meaning: I was listening to the music. I suppose even then I preferred those poems I could also make sense of – the luminous ‘Fern Hill’ or ‘Poem in October’: but meaning was – for me, then – secondary to music.
Nowadays, though I still love the music, I’m looking for meaning too. So revisiting ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’ is a moving experience for me. Perhaps I couldn’t have understood it, back then – is it really so long ago? – when, although of course I wrote, I hadn’t even begun to understand the demands of writing as a discipline. Well, this poem shows that Dylan Thomas did - of course he did! - and maybe, just maybe, I’ve lived enough to begin genuinely to understand some of his poems.
"My craft, or sullen art.” How honest that adjective is: ‘sullen’: because writing can be so hard, so difficult – so damned uncooperative! You try and you try, and it’s not good enough, still not good enough, but you keep trying. You keep on trying because what you’re really aiming for, what you want most – and he’s right, he’s right – is not money, not ‘ambition or bread’, not fame: ‘the strut and trade of charms/On the ivory stages’. No.
Don’t write for the special cases, don't write for the critics. Don't write (as most of us don't dare, though Thomas might have dared) with an eye on posterity and the hope of joining the ranks of ‘the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms’. Don’t write for fame. Don’t write for money. You probably won’t get much of either. Write for the lovers, for living and breathing human beings getting on with life, who have no idea about the effort that goes into writing and who couldn’t care less.
5 Comments on Our Craft and Sullen Art - Katherine Langrish, last added: 12/19/2009
Yes, I too have been drunk on words, drunk on poetry, spending a whole decade immersed in the musicality, the fire, the power of it - poetry that gets to the truth, expresses life experience more succinctly than any story ever could. Poetry was, and still is, my first love, and now that I write children's novels I still long to return to the writing from the soul. Now pleased my university course includes a compulsory poetry section. It's poetry for children, but no less powerful and fascinating for that, and I'm once more lost in its magic spell.
The magic of poetry transends age. It just has a different effect on a 4-year-old than on a 70-year-old. Like most of life, the wider and deeper your experience the more meaning you get from any art - poetry, prose, music, painting. I dont' write a lot of poetry these days - don't have time to develop the mindset it requires (it's all I can manage to develop the mindset for writing prose). I do still read a lot of it - and if it's good, I find new meanings each time. Someone remarked that good poetry reads as smoothly as prose and good prose is often poetic. Every reader and every writer should start out with poetry.
Great post, Kath! And Steeleweed, I agree with you one hundred pussent about stqrting with poetry, it teaches one economy and how to get a lot of meaning into a few words - which if you're writing for young people and trying to get the atmosphere right, is crucial.
Lovely post, Kath! I'd just like to say that if you go to the Poetry Society website, and follow links to the Knit a poem or some such, this is the poem that lots of people knitted a letter for. The individual letters and white background squares were stitched together by volunteers and the huge poetry quilt affair is going round the country on exhibition. I was asked to come to the celebratory reading in Manchester because I'd knitted one of the background white squares but I couldn't, as I was away. Most annoying. It was fun to be part of this project!
The executives behind Literature Wales will launch the first-ever International Dylan Day on May 14th.
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I have a shed - brick built, with a flat, leaking concrete roof, full of spiders and junk. I shan't be cleaning it out. And I have a room of my own - so full of clutter I'm resistant to tidying that I've been forced out. I only use it when I need the printer. I write on my laptop in a corner of the sofa. I don't have any shed-envy - but then, I don't have to share my house. I can imagine there would be trouble and strife if I did.
What an enjoyable and beautifully illustrated piece. Francis is now left with a completely bare concrete base - a tabula rasa if eve I saw one. Meanwhile we have discovered (or been discovered by) the website shedworking which you may well wish to visit yourself - eye-candy for shedfreaks. Personally I plan to return to my attic, as soon as F vacates. http://www.shedworking.co.uk/2012/05/francis-wheens-shed-disaster.html
Oh I would love a shed - or even just a real space of my own. I actually have a whole working life in a corner of my bedroom. It is NOT a good idea but there is nowhere else.
I do think though that one should keep a copy of things in a safe and separate place.
This is going to fuel your shed-envy, Celia, but.... This very apt for me at the moment, since at this VERY minute I am waiting for an electrician to arrive to connect electricity to my glorious shed which was installed last week. It's hyper-insulated, incredibly light (east and south facing walls are glass) and all i can see from it are trees and plants (currently rhodies and azaleas in full flower) and I can't wait to write in it! Mostly I am looking for to actually *going* to work, like a proper person.
This is a wonderful post and it was lovely to see all those sheds. Dylan's is superb and I love your artist pal's pictures of it. I have no shed envy whatsoever, though they are super! Happy to work in my study at home. A back bedroom looking out on to the garden. My desk faces the wall, not the window and I have bookshelves all around me and knick nacks of various kinds on the desk. I sometimes move my laptop to the kitchen but not often. Particularly sad to think of poor Francis Wheen, whom I know a little. That is a disaster of huge proportions and I can't begin to think how I'd feel if all my books etc went up in smoke. YOUR space, Celia, looks very good to me! And the main thing is: it produces your work, so you have no complaints! Nor should any other Sassie...if it ain't broke, etc.
Yes, I try to visit every time I am in Wales, I love the crumpled pieces of paper on the floor as though he has just left.
Excellent piece of writing. I have added it to the Dylan Thomas Boathouse facebook page, linked below. Hope that's ok! Good to meet you the other week. Jon
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dylan-Thomas-Boathouse-Tea-Room/227795500585636
Loved this! Wonderful all those pictures of sheds. I am now suffering from a serious case of shed envy... a condition probably suffered only by writers and gardeners.
A lovely post - and I do like Julia Griffitht-Jones' drawings! All this has made me nostalgic for my own rather lovely ex-shed. I would like to think that someone else will use it for writing one day. Though I must say there are advantages to being in the house - especially in freezing weather!
Nicola has fuelled my shed envy and I'm sorry if I triggered a bout of nostalgia, Linda. I'm so excited about the Boathouse having it's own Facebook Page - I've gone off and liked it straight away, I'm glad you liked the piece, Jon. Thanks for the inspiration and the bara brith. Everyone who has heard of Francis' shed disaster, Julia, is full of sorrow and sympathy. Only writers, or artists can know what a loss it must have been. I know it doesn't really matter where we write, but to lose ones things, one's books, above all, one's work must be devastating.
I must be very greedy because I now have shed envy even though I have a delightful study with an extensive attached roof garden overlooking garden and field for working on sunny days. Table and wifi on the roof, too. But I'd still like a Dahlesque shed.
I once saw a wonderful gypsy-style caravan with wood-burning stove that you could have installed in the garden as an office and wanted it desperately, but it was £10,000 and really very unnecessary...
I must be very greedy because I now have shed envy even though I have a delightful study with an extensive attached roof garden overlooking garden and field for working on sunny days. Table and wifi on the roof, too. But I'd still like a Dahlesque shed.
I once saw a wonderful gypsy-style caravan with wood-burning stove that you could have installed in the garden as an office and wanted it desperately, but it was £10,000 and really very unnecessary...
I have a shed/summerhouse which I use sometimes, but will be able to use much more once all my children are at school... just isn't possible to lock myself away in there with 3 and 2 year olds in tow :)
Lovely post, Celia.
It is fascinating to see other people's sheds and the things they keep in them to surround them when they are writing.
I love my shed. It's called 'Tuscany' and it is amazing how different it feels being inside the shed rather than writing anywhere else. There is a sense of quiet that makes it easy to write, even when the writing is being difficult!
You can see it on a previous ABBA blog here http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/collaborating-or-flying-solo-linda.html
Bit late - but this is such a lovely post, Celia. I love all the shed pics, and love thinking of Dylan Thomas's shed filled with lists of his words. WOW!
I do suffer a little bit from shed envy. There's something so romantic about the idea. However, I have a beautiful attic room with views of the sea for my study, and I adore it so probably wouldn't swap!
Oh, no! I've got attic envy now! Thanks to everyone who responded to this post. It's fascinating to hear about where others write and impossible not to envy some people, but ultimately it's what gets written that matters.