Monday, May 21, 1934

Walked to school and home with Ruth Ray. Nadine and Pauline didn't go. Went with Daddy to a job.

Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953)

Thomas began writing poetry as a child, publishing his work in school magazines. By 1930 he had taken to writing poems in penny notebooks; a number of his poems were published in the "Poet's Corner" of the Sunday Referee and in the influential New Verse. Ralph Maud, in Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry, declared that the writer's first published poem was the subsequently popular "And death shall have no dominion," which appeared on May 8, 1933, in the New English Weekly.

The notebooks in which Thomas composed between 1930 and 1934, when he was sixteen to twenty years old, reveal the young poet's struggle with a number of personal crises, the origins of which are rather obscure. In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg described them as "related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one's identity." Revised versions of some of the notebooks' poems became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems.