Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, in South Wales, in a house on a hill above the town, and named after a figure in the old Welsh tales of the Mabinogion. His father was an English teacher who loved poetry and read Shakespeare aloud to him as a baby; he spoke no Welsh at home. Dylan was a poor student at everything but English, and left school at sixteen to become a junior reporter on the local paper.

He was writing all the while. Into a series of school exercise books he poured hundreds of poems, and a surprising number of his best-known ones were first drafted there, as a teenager. His first book, 18 Poems, came out in 1934, when he was twenty, and readers were startled by poems that sounded like no one else’s: dense, musical, full of birth and death and the sea, meant to be heard as much as read.

He became a famous voice, in a literal sense. Thomas read on the BBC through the 1940s, in a rich, rolling voice that made him a radio star. He wrote and read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which became a holiday tradition for millions, and the long memory of childhood summers in “Fern Hill.” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the villanelle that begs a dying father to fight on, was written as his own father’s health failed.

He settled with his wife, Caitlin, and their children in Laugharne, a little town on an estuary in Carmarthenshire, writing in a shed above the water. Out of Laugharne and other small Welsh towns grew Under Milk Wood, his “play for voices,” which follows the dreams and gossip of the people of an imaginary seaside village through one spring day.

Thomas made several reading tours of America, where he drew enormous crowds and drank enormously. The first full reading of Under Milk Wood, with actors, was given in New York in May 1953. That November, on another tour, he collapsed at the Chelsea Hotel and died in a New York hospital at thirty-nine. Richard Burton led the first BBC broadcast of the play a few months later. Another poet of the sea and of fierce feeling, Sylvia Plath, was born on his eighteenth birthday, October 27, 1932.