Dylan

The poet Dylan Thomas died in New York 25 years ago today at the age of 39. Alcohol and a doctor's injection of morphia were the immediate causes. Ever since his childhood in Wales, his life was a spectacular attempt - comic at times, serious below the surface, tragic at the finish -to survive on his own bizarre terms as the poet to end all poets. By the 1950s, that first postwar decade of uneasiness and change, Dylan Thomas was a legend to his admirers, but a burnt-out case to himself. As he tours America to read poetry to rapt audiences, his past crowds in on him, the fractured memories of a man at the end of his tether.