Robinson Jeffers Profile

Robinson Jeffers Profile

Jun 12, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I admire and appreciate the work of poet and environmentalist Robinson Jeffers, who is known for his poetry about our beloved Central California Coast.

John Robinson Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1887. His father was a Presbyterian minister, his mother a Biblical scholar, and his brother became a well-known astronomer. As a child, Jeffers studied the Bible and classical languages. During his youth, he traveled through Europe and attended school in France, Germany, and Switzerland. By the time he was 12, Jeffers was fluent in French, German, and English, and he had a good knowledge of Latin and Greek.

When he was 18, Jeffers earned his degree from Occidental College in California and then studied literature at the University of Southern California as a graduate student. Jeffers then studied medicine at USC for three years, although he dropped out of medical school, and then enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he also abandoned after just one semester.

Jeffers returned to Los Angeles. In 1906, he met Una Kuster, a fellow graduate student, who was married at the time to a well-known attorney, and they had a passionate love affair— that became a huge scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times. In 1912, Jeffers published his first book of poetry, Flagons and Apples, although it didn’t receive much attention. When Una got divorced in 1913, she married Jeffers the next day, and they moved to Carmel, California together.

In 1919 Jeffers built a granite house in Carmel with his own hands, named Tor House, later, he added a large four-story stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower. This became Jeffers’ family home until the end of his life. It was a magnificent and impressive accomplishment. Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, described the Tor House as “a poem-like masterpiece” with “more direct intelligence per square inch than any other house in America.”

Around this time Jeffers began to exclusively write poetry, and he wrote his epic poem Tamar, which is a controversial tale about a ranch family, involving incest and violence. Tamar first appeared in Jeffers’ poetry collection Tamar and Other Poems, which was published in 1924. This collection brought attention to Jeffers’ work and his fame grew over the following years.

According to one account, “With the publication of Tamar and Other Poems… Jeffers’ fame sprung into being virtually overnight. One decade and multiple collections of poetry later, he had become arguably the most famous poet in the United States.” In 1932 Jeffers appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea was performed on Broadway.

In 1948 Jeffers published a poetry collection titled The Double Axe and Other Poems, which included some poems that were critical of U.S. involvement in the Second World War. The publisher censored eleven poems in the collection and included a warning that Jeffers’ views “were not those of the publishing company,” and that the book contained some potentially “unpatriotic” poems. It wasn’t until 1977 that the full collection of poems was finally published.

During the 1950s and later, as the environmental movement gained momentum, Jeffers became an important voice for protecting the natural world. He also developed a unique philosophy. Jeffers coined the term “inhumanism,” which means “the belief that humankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the astonishing beauty of things.” Jeffers refers to this philosophy in some of his poems. For example, in his poem Carmel Point Jeffers encourages people to “uncenter” themselves.

In his poem The Double Axe, Jeffers describes “inhumanism” as “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. … It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.” Jeffers believed that humanity had been rejected by an uncaring divine being, and that everyone should transcend emotion, and embrace an indifferent God.

Nature serves as a backdrop for much of Jeffers’ poetry. Animals and aspects of the natural world are often compared to humans, with humans being shown as inferior. Jeffers preferred nature to people, as he felt that our species failed to recognize the significance of other creatures and the natural world. His work celebrates the beauty of seas and skies, and the freedom of wild animals, and it strives to create a vision of the world in which human experience is questioned and decentered.

Although Jeffers was known to be rather reclusive, he corresponded and interacted with other notable writers and poets during his life, such as Benjamin De Casseres and D.H. Lawrence.

Jeffers died in 1962. His poems have been translated into numerous languages and published worldwide. Jeffers’ poetry has also influenced many writers, such as Gary Snyder and Charles Bukowski, who said that Jeffers was his favorite poet. In 1973 Jeffers was honored on a U.S. postage stamp.

Some of the quotes that Jeffers is known for include:

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

I have heard the summer dust crying to be born. 

Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain. 

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me, Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow—And man’s dark soul.

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed. 

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.

by David Jay Brown

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Charles Baudelaire Profile

Charles Baudelaire Profile

Apr 5, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I have both long admired the writings of the French poet, philosopher, essayist, and art critic Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire is known for his major contributions to 19th-century French literature and is renowned for his revolutionary collection of lyric poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. His father was a senior civil servant and amateur artist, and he was 34 years older than Baudelaire‘s mother. Baudelaire was 6 years old when his father died, so he never had an opportunity to know him well, and his mother remarried a man that Baudelaire never got along with well.

Baudelaire was educated during his stay at a boarding school in Lyon. In 1835, a fellow student at the school had this to say about Baudelaire, “[He was] much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils… we are bound to one another… by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature.” Baudelaire later attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he studied law, and gained his degree in 1839. At the time, the law was a popular course of study for those not yet decided on any particular career.

Baudelaire spent his days in art galleries and cafés, and he experimented with opium and hashish. In 1841 he went on a voyage to Calcutta, India, and the trip left vivid impressions on him that later influenced his poetry. Baudelaire found beauty in the darker elements of human experience and was rather eccentric in his style of dress. He often dressed in black, dyed his hair green, and rebelled against the conformist, bourgeois world of 19th-century Paris in both his personal life and his poetry.

Baudelaire’s first art review was published in 1845, and between 1844 and 1847 eleven of Baudelaire’s poems were published in the Parisian weekly review magazine L’Artiste under a pen name. These were Baudelaire’s first published poems and it is unknown why he used a pen name for both the poems and the art review.

In 1847, Baudelaire’s novella, La Fanfarlo was published. The name in the title, Fanfarlo, has been associated with a Polka-dancer of the time. This novella tells the fictionalized story of the writer’s love affair with a dancer. That same year Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which he felt a strong kinship with.

Baudelaire translated a number of important English works into French, such as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and many of Poe’s works, which helped to popularize his work in France. Although Baudelaire admired Poe, and the two never met, there was a literary connection between the two writers. Baudelaire found tales and poems by Poe that he claimed, “had long existed” in his “own brain but never taken shape.” Baudelaire also wrote critical essays on contemporary art, and essays on a variety of other subjects.

In 1857 Baudelaire’s most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal was first published, although more poems were added in later editions. Upon its original publication, the poetry collection was embroiled in controversy. Within a month of its publication, the French authorities brought legal action against Baudelaire and his publisher, claiming that the work was “an insult to public decency.”

Although the French government condemned the poetry collection when it was first published, with six of its poems censored due to their “immorality,” it is now considered an important work of French poetry. The poems in this radical volume frequently break with tradition, and deal with themes relating to decadence, eroticism, suffering, and an aspiration toward an ideal world. The final volume of Les Fleurs du mal was published posthumously in 1868, and it includes nearly all of Baudelaire’s poetry, written from 1840 until his death. 

Despite his inheritance of a respectable fortune at the age of 21, making his way financially wasn’t easy for Baudelaire, as he had a taste for extravagance. By 1844, just two years later, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance, and he had become known in artistic circles as a “dandy” and “free spender.” Baudelaire “regularly begged his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.” During the course of his life, he borrowed from his mother an estimated total of 20,473 francs, and much of what is known of his later life comes from his correspondence with her. Baudelaire faced increasing financial difficulties toward the end of his life; he was forced to sell off many of his possessions in order to pay his debts and was frequently in and out of debtors’ prison.

In 1859 Baudelaire’s health began to deteriorate due to chronic illness brought on by stress, poverty, syphilis, and his long-term use of laudanum, a tincture of opium. In 1861 his financial difficulties increased when his publisher went bankrupt. Despite these difficulties, Baudelaire continued to write and publish his works, and he gained recognition for his critical essays.

Baudelaire died in 1867 at the age of 47, leaving behind a legacy as one of the greatest poets in French literature. He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. Baudelaire’s mother died in 1871, outliving her son by almost four years.

Despite Baudelaire’s relatively slim production of poetry, his work has had a huge influence on Modernism, a movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms of expression, and which embraced experimentation and “a focus on the individual experience.” Baudelaire is noted for his innovative use of creative language, as well as for his use of symbolism and imagery in his poetry, and his work has had a significant impact on later poets.

Some of the quotes that Charles Baudelaire is known for include:

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

by David Jay Brown

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Rainer Marie Rilke Profile

Rainer Marie Rilke Profile

Apr 5, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I have both long enjoyed the writings of Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Marie Rilke, particularly his Letters to a Young Poet.

In 1875 Rainer Marie Rilke was born in Prague, which was then part of Austria-Hungary. His father was a railway official and his mother came from a well-to-do family. Rilke had an older sister who died before he was born, and this unfortunate tragedy was said to influence how his mother treated him as a child, “as if he were a girl” by the way that she dressed and treated him.

Despite his somewhat feminine nature, and being poetically sensitive and artistically talented in his youth, from 1886 to 1891 Rilke was pressured by his parents to attend a military academy. He left the academy due to illness and attended a German trade school for a short time, but he was expelled from this school in 1892 at the age of 16. From 1892 to 1895, Rilke was tutored for his university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895, and until 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague at Charles University and in Munich, Germany.

In 1895 Rilke published his first work, a volume of poetry called Leben und Lieder (“Life and Songs”). In 1897 Rilke met a married woman in Munich who changed his life, Lou Andreas-Salomé, with whom he fell in love and had a relationship with. Salomé had trained with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke. Their relationship lasted until 1900, and Rilke took two extensive trips to Russia to spend time with her. Around this time, Rilke changed his first name from “René” to “Rainer,” at Salomé’s urging, because she thought that name to be “more masculine, forceful, and Germanic.”

In 1899 Rilke traveled with Salomé and her husband to Moscow, where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. In 1900, Rilke stayed at an artists’ colony in Worpswede, Germany, and it was here that he got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year, and their relationship continued for the rest of his life. Their daughter Ruth was born in 1901.

In 1902 Rilke traveled to Paris to write an essay on the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and this is where he really began his writing career, although he initially had some hardships in the new city that he wrote about later. In Paris, he encountered Modernism, a movement of the time that reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization, and which reflected the emerging industrial world. Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and then the artwork of Paul Cézanne. For a while, Rilke acted as Rodin’s secretary and he also lectured on Rodin’s work. Rilke also wrote a book about Rodin titled Auguste Rodin.

In 1902 Rilke published Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images), a collection of poetry that was later expanded in a 1906 edition. In 1905 Rilke published Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours), a collection of dreamy melodic poetry that he had written between 1899 and 1903. In 1907 and 1908 Rilke published additional poetry collections, Neue Gedichte (New Poems), and Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems). In 1910 he published his only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Btigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), which is semi-autobiographical and describes the difficult time that he had when he first arrived in Paris.

For around eight years Rilke experienced depression and a lack of creativity and didn’t write much between 1911 and 1919. During this time he traveled across North Africa and Europe in search of inspiration. In 1919 he began working again on his book Duino Elegies, a collection of poems that he had started in 1912, while he was a guest at the castle of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, who was part of a German noble family, on the Adriatic Sea, near Trieste, Italy. Duino Elegies had languished for years, and the collection was finally published in 1923.

In 1922 Rilke wrote a cycle of 55 sonnets that were published the following year under the title Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). These sonnets, inspired by the death of his daughter’s friend, were written during a period of 3 weeks that Rilke described as a “savage creative storm.” That same year Rilke also completed work on a ten-poem collection entitled Duino Elegies, which had taken ten years to complete, and has been described as “deeply philosophical and mystical.” The Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies are largely considered Rilke’s masterpieces and the “highest expressions of his talent.”

There is a mystical quality in much of Rilke’s work, and he extensively engaged with metaphors and contradictions in his poetry and prose to convey a sense of disbelief and a crisis in his faith. He also incorporated figures from Greek mythology and angels into his poems. Between 1902 and 1908, Rilke corresponded with a young writer named Franz Xaver Kappus, who was studying at the military academy that Rilke had also attended. Kappus had written to Rilke when he was feeling uncertain about his future as a military officer or a poet. Rilke advised Kappus on “how a poet should feel, love and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art.” These letters offered profound insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s poetry, as well as his creative process, and were written during a key period of Rilke’s early artistic development. In 1929 these letters were first published in the now classic volume, Letters to a Young Poet.

Shortly before his death, Rilke was diagnosed with leukemia. Rilke died in 1926, in the arms of his doctor, in Switzerland. In 1927 he was buried in the Raron cemetery in Visp, Switzerland. Rilke chose these words for his own epitaph:

“Rose, o pure contradiction, desire
to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids.”

In addition to his essays, famous letters, and one novel, during his lifetime Rilke produced over 400 poems, as well as short stories and plays. Rilke is currently one of the best-selling poets in the United States and his spirit lives on. Many self-help authors reference his work, and he is frequently quoted in television shows, films, and music, especially when the subjects of love or angels are discussed. I also see Rilke quoted regularly in social media memes.

Some of the quotes that Rainer Marie Rilke is known for include:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

The only journey is the one within.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

by David Jay Brown

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Hafez Profile

Hafez Profile

Mar 29, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

A few weeks ago I wrote a profile about the 14th Century Persian poet Rumi. A passion for Rumi’s poetry led me to the work of another 14th Century Persian poet, Hafez, whose beautiful spiritual poetry is equally insightful and inspirational. Carolyn and I have both enjoyed Hafez’s wonderful lyrical poems over the years, and his collected works are often regarded as some of the most treasured literature to emerge out of Persia.

Commonly known by his pen name “Hafez” (or “Hafiz”), the late Sufi poet was born as Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī sometime between 1310 and 1325 in Shiraz, which is located in present-day Iran. Although accounts vary, most scholars think Hafez was born in 1315 or 1320. Not much is known for certain about Hafez’s early life, so historians rely on anecdotes to try and understand what happened, and separating fact from legend about Hafez is tricky, as many mythical stories were written about him after his death.

Hafez is said to have memorized the entire Quran when he was young, by listening to his father read it. He was given the name “Hafez” at an early age, which was a title given to those who had memorized the Quran by heart, and means “memorizer and safe keeper.” Hafez must have had an incredible memory, for he is said to have memorized numerous other writings as well, including the works of Rumi.

Hafez had two brothers; his father was a coal merchant who died young and left the family in debt. Hafez’s uncle helped to raise him, and he had to leave school to work for his family, first in a drapery shop and then in a bakery. While working at the bakery, Hafez had to deliver bread to a beautiful young woman named Shakh-e Nabat, who he fell in love with, and to whom many of his poems were addressed.

Enraptured by this young woman’s beauty, but knowing that his love for her would not be returned, he supposedly held a 40-day-and-night “mystic vigil” at the tomb of Baba Kuhi (a 10th Century Persian Sufi), where he encountered an angel. This was a life-changing event for Hafez, as the angel led him into his pursuit of a spiritual union with the divine.

Hafez became a Sufi, a practitioner of the mystic branch of Islam. He received a classical religious education, lectured on the Quran and other theological subjects, and he wrote commentaries on religious classics. Hafez married when he was in his twenties and had one child.

Hafez mostly wrote lyrical poetry, or what is known as “ghazals,” which are lyric poems with a fixed number of verses and a repeated rhyme, and usually set to music. Some of the themes of Hafez’s ghazals include love, faith, and exposing hypocrisy. He was also known to ignore the religious taboos of his time, and he found humor in some of his society’s religious doctrines. Hafez was a court poet, and as such, was supported by patronage from several successive Persian regimes, although he briefly fell out of favor with one of the rulers due to his mocking of inferior poets.

Hafez wrote approximately 994 poems, which were collected into (at least) 5 volumes, and his poems have been translated into all major languages. The Complete Divan of Hafez, which contains 793 of his ghazals and other spiritual love poems, is available in English translation. Translations of his collections Faces of Love, Beloved: 81 Poems from Hafez, and The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz are also available.

At the age of 60, Hafez is said to have begun another 40-day-and-night vigil, by sitting inside a circle that he had drawn. On the 40th day, it was said that he had achieved “cosmic consciousness” and attained spiritual union with the divine.

Hafez died in 1390. His tomb is located in Shiraz, the city of his birth. The Tomb of Hafez, known as Hāfezieh, is a popular destination for tourists. It is composed of two memorial structures erected on the northern edge of Shiraz, which house the marble tomb of Hafez.

Today Hafez is the most popular poet in his native country, and October 12th is celebrated every year as Hafez Day in Iran. His spirit is alive and well here too. His poetry is read widely, and I see Hafez’s wisdom shared on social media memes almost daily.

Some of the quotes that Hafez is remembered for include:

I wish I could show you… the astonishing light of your own being.

You, yourself, are your own obstacle; rise above yourself.

Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.

What we speak becomes the house we live in.

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.

The heart is a thousand-stringed instrument that can only be tuned with love.

For I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most.

An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.

by David Jay Brown

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William Blake Profile

William Blake Profile

Mar 20, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I both appreciate William Blake’s divinely inspired artwork and magnificent poetry.

Born in London in 1757, Blake was an English poet, painter, prophet, and printmaker known for his extraordinary visionary paintings, lithographs, drawings, and numerous volumes of beautiful mystical poems.

Blake attended school just long enough to learn how to read and write. He read widely on his own and was exposed to many bound books and prints by his parents. At the age of ten, his parents arranged for him to take drawing classes, and he went on to become a professional engraver. In 1779 he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he studied for six years.

From a young age, and throughout his life, Blake claimed to see visions of a spiritual nature. The visions were often associated with religious themes and imagery; he claimed to see angels too. As a Romantic artist and poet, Blake stressed the primacy of individual imagination and inspiration to the creative process. He believed that imaginative insight was the only way to remove the veil of rational thought that obscures the true nature of reality, claiming that “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Blake’s extraordinary paintings depict powerful biblical and literary scenes, glorious angels, and radiant illuminated beings, while his poems speak out against social injustices and express mystical visions. Blake illustrated his poems and created beautiful books, such as Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, by integrating writing and painting into a single creative process and using innovative production techniques that combined image and text in single compositions.

Blake’s spiritual visions and insights were central to his creativity, and in his work, he created a complex and unique mythology, with a pantheon populated by deities such as Orc, Urizen, and Enitharmion. Blake illustrated spectacular grand narratives of his own design that were played out in a universe that seemed to exist in a separate reality.

Blake didn’t have it easy. His contemporaries considered him insane, and his lack of commercial success meant he lived in relative poverty. But today he is appreciated as a seminal figure in the history of poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. Blake died in 1827, with his beloved wife by his side.

Some quotes that William Blake is remembered for include:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

by David Jay Brown

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Dylan Thomas Profile

Dylan Thomas Profile

Mar 15, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Dylan Thomas was a brilliant Welsh poet and writer whom Carolyn and I both admire, who has been acknowledged as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. His iconic poems— which include such masterpieces as “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion,” are known for their acute use of lyricism, imagery, and emotion. Although influenced by the Romantic tradition, Thomas’ refusal to align with any literary group or movement has made his work difficult to categorize and ever more important.

Self-described as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet,” Dylan Thomas lived a short life; he died at the age of 39, but packed a lot of creative output into those years. Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen, in 1930, to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, but left this job two years later so that he could concentrate full-time on his poetry. Thomas wrote 200 poems between 1930 and 1934 when he was in his late teens and had nine volumes of poetry and ten volumes of prose published. Even though Thomas was recognized as a great poet during his lifetime, he had difficulty earning a living as a writer and augmented his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts.

Dylan Thomas became a pop star among poets, known for his dramatic poetry readings, and he had as many fans of his live performances as readers of his published poems. Many people have been inspired by his powerful poetry. Poet Sylvia Plath has said that Thomas was one of her most important influences, and singer-songwriter Bob Zimmerman renamed himself “Bob Dylan,” because he was so inspired and influenced by Dylan Thomas. Lovers of Thomas’ extraordinary work celebrate every year on May 14th, which is International Dylan Thomas Day.

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld

Carolyn with statue of Dylan Thomas at the Dylan Thomas Theater, Swansea, Wales

Our beloved friend Peter Thabit Jones, who is a scholar and poet, wrote a wonderful book, Dylan Thomas: Walking Tour of Greenwich Village. Jones’s book serves as a self-guided tour of ten places in Greenwich Village, New York, associated with Thomas, and it contains a foreword by Hannah Ellis, the granddaughter of Dylan Thomas.

Some quotes that Dylan Thomas is remembered for include:

When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

by David Jay Brown

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