Dylan Thomas

Duration: 30

Year Published: 1980

Creator: Films Incorporated

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: Archival photographs, live action dramatizations and readings are intertwined in this biographical portrait of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), a poet who never grew up. Cameras visit Thomas' Welsh-speaking hometown of Swansea and the farm called Fern Hill where he spent summers as a youth. Thomas began writing poetry at 12 and by age 18 was producing the mysterious, haunting poems that evinced his signature style. Poems like The Hunchback in the park, portions of which are read here, evoke the ambivalent experiences of childhood, a persistent theme of the writer's work. During World War II, Dylan Thomas wrote morale-boosting scripts for propaganda films and later read and acted for radio. One of Thomas' last works was a radio play commissioned by the BBC entitled Under Milkwood which the author performed first in the United States. Unfortunately, Thomas succumbed to an untimely death, attributed by some to alcoholism, by others, to depression. To many, however, Dylan Thomas remains the voice of poetry.