David John Thomas taught his son to recite Shakespeare before the boy could read.
By age four, Dylan Thomas was sounding out the rhythms of the English language under his father’s instruction, not understanding the words, but learning to feel them in his mouth, his chest, his breath.
D.J. Thomas, a frustrated English teacher who believed his first-class honours degree deserved a university chair, poured his thwarted ambitions into his son’s throat.
He published the boy’s first poems in the school magazine. He spent evenings in his study, surrounded by books, shaping the instrument that would become one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive poetic voices.
Decades later, that son would use the voice his father gave him to issue a command:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
