Known for writing explosive, musical verse, Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914–1953) was born in Swansea, Wales. He said his poetry was “the record of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light,” and readers have long heard in his voice both tenderness and thunder.

"I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression," he wrote to poet Henry Treece.

Thomas's villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night is a fierce plea to his father, who was going blind. Composed in 1947 and first published in 1951, the poem entered his 1952 collection In Country Sleep. It is a lantern held high at the edge of death, asking us to love life until the last ember glows.

Thomas lived with intensity and called his most charged lyrics “statements on the way to the grave.” Read his lines aloud and you hear the craft: the surge of sound, the braid of image and breath, the raw beauty that refuses to dim.

“The closer I move to death,” he said, “the louder the sun blooms.” Even now, his poems bloom... defiant and full of insight.