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by Unknown
created Aug 2019
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"Dylan Thomas finished Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, a villanelle, in 1951, and sent it off to an editor friend of a magazine, together with a note which read:
“The only person I can’t show the little enclosed poem to is, of course, my father, who doesn’t know he’s dying”.
He also remarked to his friend, American Robert J. Gibson, that the spark for the poem was his father's approaching blindness. Thomas's father was to pass away a year later and the poet himself succumbed to illness and died in 1953.
When Dylan Thomas was a child his father would read Shakespeare and nursery rhymes to him and the dreamy, sensitive Welsh boy absorbed the sounds and music of the texts at an early age.
Their relationship was complex but loving. Dylan Thomas respected his father, a senior master of English, but was no academic at school, and left without furthering his education at university. The young Dylan wanted to publish his poems and go one better than his father, himself a frustrated, never published poet.
So Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is a poem that meant a lot to Dylan Thomas, who wanted to see his father face death in a blaze of defiance."