Page "Dylan Thomas" Paragraph 11

Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: " And death shall have no dominion ", " Before I Knocked " and " The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower ".

" And death shall have no dominion " appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933.

When " Light breaks where no sun shines " appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender.

They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934.

18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was " the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years ".

The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir.

The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves.

A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin.

In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise.

In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London.

It was the time that Thomas ' reputation for heavy drinking developed.