Maggie's Farm

A quote from The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive - Dylan Thomas, the last true bohemian

Thomas may have played the part of the doomed poet, excused by his genius from following the conventions of decent behavior. But he was a genius: few are the twentieth-century English poets who wrote lines that not only were memorable but that also make the soul vibrate. Thomas was one of them.

Thomas was aware from an early age of his own genius. In his book of marvelously evocative stories about his childhood and adolescence, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, published in 1940, when he was 26, Thomas recalls reciting a poem he had written 12 years earlier, in which the lines appear:

    The frost has known,
    From scattered conclave by the few winds blown,
    That the lone genius in my roots,
    Bare down there in a jungle of fruits,
    Has planted a green year, for praise, in the heart of my upgrowing days.