Child's Christmas in Wales

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was born in Swansea, Wales, and is regarded as one of the most important Welsh poets writing in English. His early collection 18 Poems (1934), published when he was twenty, announced a major new voice — dense, incantatory, and rooted in the body and the natural world. His later collections include Deaths and Entrances (1946), containing Fern Hill and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. His verse drama for radio, Under Milk Wood, was broadcast posthumously in 1954. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, a villanelle addressed to his dying father, is among the most celebrated poems in the English language. He died in New York at thirty-nine.