{"id":264350,"date":"2024-06-24T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=264350"},"modified":"2024-06-13T09:05:26","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T08:05:26","slug":"the-story-behind-dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night-and-the-poets-own-stirring-reading-of-his-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/the-story-behind-dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night-and-the-poets-own-stirring-reading-of-his-masterpiece\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story Behind Dylan Thomas\u2019 \u201cDo Not Go Gentle into That Good Night\u201d and the Poet\u2019s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPoetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,\u201d<\/em> Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does<\/a>. \u201cInsofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,\u201d<\/em> Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics<\/a>. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than \u201cDo not go gentle into that good night<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas<\/strong> (October 27, 1914\u2013November 9, 1953).<\/p>\n

Written in 1947, Thomas\u2019s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure<\/em> in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems<\/em><\/a>. In the fall of the following year, Thomas \u2014 a self-described \u201croistering, drunken and doomed poet\u201d \u2014 drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in North America organized by the US poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts<\/a>. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell \u2014 who had had a three-week romance with Thomas \u2014 to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Dylan Thomas, early 1940s<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.<\/p>\n

When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet\u2019s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy \u2014 a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em>, and Christopher Nolan made \u201cDo not go gentle into that good night\u201d a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Upon receiving news of Thomas\u2019s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop<\/a> wrote in an astonished letter<\/a> to a friend:<\/p>\n

It must be true, but I still can\u2019t believe it \u2014 even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way\u2026 Thomas\u2019s poetry is so narrow \u2014 just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose\u2014with not much space for living along the way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore<\/a>, Bishop further crystallized Thomas\u2019s singular genius:<\/p>\n

I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas\u2019s death\u2026 He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker<\/em> poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas<\/em><\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It\u2019s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas\u2019s \u201cDo not go gentle into that good night\u201d is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there\u2019s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas\u2019s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDo not go gentle into that good night\u201d remains, indeed, Thomas\u2019s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive \u2014 both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques \u2014 work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.<\/p>\n

At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on \u201cDo not go gentle into that good night.\u201d Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n

In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:<\/p>\n