Quite Early One Morning

by Dylan Thomas

In England and America Dylan Thomas made his art and personality widely known through public readings, radio broadcasts and recordings. Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice.

Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing—“A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which has been called ‘the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, Fiction, Essays, Classics, Literature, British Literature

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who wrote in English. Many regard him as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.

In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhapsodic lyricism of Fern Hill.

Reviews

[Julie]

10/10 +

Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold unseasonable holiday, to see if it was raining still, if the outhouse had been blown away, potatoes, shears, rat-killer, shrimpnets, and tins of rusty nails aloft on the wind, and if all the cliffs were left. It had been such a ferocious night that someone in the smoky ship-pictured bar had said he could feel his tombstone shaking even though he was not dead yet or, at least, was moving; but the morning shone as clear and calm as one always imagines tomorrow will shine.

Quite possibly one of the best beginnings to any story; unless of course it's the beginning to A Child's Christmas in Wales.

This is a perfect collection of Thomas's work, short stories and essays alike, that I've re-read often over the years, and that often coincides with my re-reading of A Child's Christmas in Wales at this season.

It brings such hope with it. Such boundless joy.

One of the best essays (tribute more than essay) that ever was written about Wilfred Owen lies hidden in the very heart of this volume; lies nestled in the core of it, to make its own statement as to what matters in life; what should matter most of all, are the words of a dead poet reaching out from beyond the grave. None has written it so eloquently as Owen; none has recognized it so viscerally as Thomas.

This is one slim volume in which I find myself again and again, time after time; where I find jewels hidden that once were lost; where, even after 25 years of reading, I find new meaning, new magic.

Not every story is a poem, but every thought is an act of poetry; some that are simply reminiscences, observations, commentary, on the more mundane aspects of literature become gush-worthy examinations of the most astute and biting:

And see too, in that linguacious stream, the tall monocled men, smelling of saddle soap and club armchairs, their breath a nice blending of whisky and fox's blood, with big protruding upper-class tusks and county mustaches, presumably invented in England and sent abroad to advertise "Punch", who lecture to women's clubs on such unlikely subjects as "The History of Etching in The Shetland Islands"; and the brassy-bossy men-women, with corrugated-iron perms, and hippo hides, who come, self-announced, as "ordinary British housewives", to talk to rich minked chunks of American matronhood about the iniquity of the Health Services, the criminal sloth of miners, the visible tail and horns of Mr. Aneurin Bevan, and the fear of everyone in England to go out alone at night because of the organised legions of coshboys against whom the police are powerless owing to the refusal of those in power to equip them with revolvers and to flog to ribbons every adolescent offender on any charge at all.

Such a superb collection which paints a perfect arc of Thomas's talent, magic, wisdom, life.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having a little Welsh blood from my father's side, I remember reading a children's book by Thomas when I was a kid, and hearing a lot about him, but it wasn't really until reading took off as an adult that I truly started to explore his work, especially his poetry, and broadcasts. This was an audio CD, so didn't actually read the book, and was narrated by Thomas himself, which gives the readings a great sense of authenticity. He recalls his childhood in Wales through little stories, told with a passionate sense of fascination for the world around him. There is a strong feeling of nostalgia in his voice, with the memories of seeing things with young and vibrant eyes still felt strongly. It's Well worth checking out for the Dylan Thomas fan.

[Matthew DeCostanza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding. The sort of book that follows you around, occupying space in your head as you steal glances at it lying on your living room table, seductively wishing to be read over and over. The prose pieces are fluid and smooth, expressing very much with very little. The essays, while they paint Thomas as rather snobbish, are highly persuasive, leaving one with the desire to become a snide commentator of false art, just as he is.

Some highlights include the collection's namesake, a brief account of a Welsh fishing village in the wee hours of the morning, the immortal "A Child's Christmas in Wales", and the sneering jab directed to J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud, etc., "How To Be a Poet".

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up a 1974 edition, Aldine Paperbacks in near new condition.
Poems, Stories, Essays. This selection of BBC Radio Broadcasts were mostly for the Welsh region of the B.B.C.
Preface
Part 1
Reminiscences of Childhood (First Version)
Reminiscences of Childhood (Second Version)
Quite Early One Morning
Memories of Christmas
Holiday Memory
How to begin a Story
The Crumbs of One Man's Year
The Festival Exhibition, 1951
The International Eisteddfod
A Visit to America
Laugharne
Return Journey
Wilfred Owen
Walter de la Mare as a Prose Writer
Sir Philip Sidney
A Dearth of Comic Writers
The English Festival of Spoken Poetry
On Reading One's Own Poems
Welsh Poets
Wales and the Artist
Three Poems
On Poetry
Notes

Five stars alone for the first story I read, A Visit to America. An hilarious jibe at the number of British writers, poets and experts on obscure subjects that were enticed on lecture tours across America.

[Randy Rhody · Rating 5 out of 5]

In school we were tortured with serious poems like “rage against the dying of the light” and “the green fuse that lights the flower.” At last - to discover at this late date how absolutely funny and witty Dylan Thomas is. One of the greatest humor writers I've read. And yes, an unmatched gift for words. This volume presents a mixture of stories, poetry, and essays. You can pick and choose what interests you.

Part One of this book contains several charming short stories, including “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, which I had always erroneously assumed would be smarmy nostalgia. In fact, like all the stories here, it is filled with unexpected moments and unpredictable characters. Videlicit: boys rushing to see the fire in Mrs. Prothero’s kitchen, Mr. Prothero waving a slipper in the smoke, and Miss Prothero offering the firemen something to read.

Part Two is made of essays, including knowledgeable pieces on Welsh Poets and Wilfred Owen and, in the challenger’s corner, hilarious treatises “How to Be a Poet, or, The Ascent of Parnassus Made Easy” and “How to Begin a Story.” The pièce de résistance, “A Visit to America,” five pages on the plight of an author making a tour of readings and book signings - a Must Read.

[Alex Benach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like fine i guess… but cant i want more

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gladys Taber, dead lo these many years, brought this book to my attention. In her own book, Stillmeadow Daybook, she quotes Thomas: "The sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling...."

That was enough for me. I requested Quite Early One Morning from the local library, and they obtained it for me on loan from the Harvey A. Andruss Library in Bloomsburg.

I haven't exposed myself to enough of Thomas's poetry to judge fairly, but having now read this book, and based on its contents alone--and the contents do include some poems--I think I prefer his prose.

Just consider, "Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold unseasonable holiday, to see if it was raining still...but the morning shone as clear and calm as one always imagines to-morrow will shine."

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales "at the beginning of the Great War," and beyond Wales "lay England, which was London, and a country called 'The Front' from which many of our neighbors never came back. (It was a country to which only young men travelled.) At the beginning, the only 'front' I knew was the little lobby before our front door; I could not understand how so many people never returned from there...."

On pages 19 and 20 I found verses that made me smile:

I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the Kidwelly,
And Mrs. Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
"Poor Captain Tiny all alone," the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone and I hated her.

Do you hear that whistling?--It's me, I am Phoebe,
The maid at the King's Head, and I am whistling like a bird.
Someone spilt a tin of pepper in the tea.
There's twenty for breakfast and I'm not going to say a word.

A few pages later Thomas remembers the Christmas when "the ice broke and the skating grocer vanished like a snowman through a white trap-door." Not poetry, just prose, but what an image. He thinks that may have been the same Christmas that "we tobogganed down the seaward hill, all the afternoon, on the best tea-tray, and Mrs. Griffiths complained, and we threw a snowball at her niece, and my hands burned so, with the heat and the cold, when I held them in front of the fire, that I cried for twenty minutes and then had some jelly."

Thomas was one of the lucky children in the city of Swansea who grew up well-fed and comfortable in a middle-class household, where there were presents and feasting and balloons and music from a gramophone at Christmas. He writes of adventuring with his boyhood friends on a Christmas afternoon into poorer streets: "We returned home through the desolate poor sea-facing streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the thick wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock-birds and the hooters of ships out in the white and whirling bay."

And one Christmas he and his friends went caroling, trudging nervously up a long dark drive to a house that seemed almost abandoned. Bravely they began to sing "Good King Wenceslas" and might have finished the song, but "...a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, suddenly joined our singing: a small, dry voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely and bright...." The boys were of the opinion that the voice might have been that of a ghost, or a troll, but all I could think when I read this was of that poor lonely soul behind the door, adding its voice to those of the youngsters come to carol, abandoned so suddenly when the singing was barely begun.

Thomas was born during the first war, and during the second, Hitler's bombs decimated his hometown, that Welsh city of Swansea. Early in the book he refers to the "hideous hole" the war made in Swansea. Much further on he writes, "It was a cold white day in High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences. Dogs, delicate as cats on water, as though they had gloves on their paws, padded over the vanished buildings. Boys romped, calling high and clear, on top of a levelled chemist's and a shoe-shop, and a little girl, wearing a man's cap, threw a snowball in a chill deserted garden that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales... I could see the swathed hill stepping up out of the town, which you never could see properly before..."

With war still on our minds, we are introduced to his favorite war poets. They are, incidentally, some of them, mine as well, first and foremost, of course, Wilfred Owen. He writes, "We had not forgotten his poetry, but perhaps we had allowed ourselves to think of it as the voice of one particular time, one place, one war. Now, at the beginning of what, in the future, may never be known to historians as the 'atomic age'--for obvious reasons: there may be no historians--we can see, rereading Owen, that he is a poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war: that of men against men."

"There is only one war: that of men against men." (Would that Dylan Thomas, writing these words over 70 years ago, in the first decade after the second war had come to an end, could see us now. On this day, Friday the 13th of March, 2026,even as I type, Vladimir Putin of Russia is bombing hell out of Ukraine because he can, and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Donald Trump of the United States are bombing hell out of Iran, because they can.)

In passing, Thomas mentions poets that I hope to learn more about: Edward Thomas, W.H. Davies, Idris Davies. There is too much religion for my taste in some of the poetry he quotes, but I loved these lines from "Day-Spring" by a Welsh poet called Henry Vaughan:

Early, while yet the dark was gay,
And gilt with stars more trim than day...

There's more, but thereafter the poem devolves into pretty expressions of religious dogma.

I looked up some poems by W.H. Davies, and "The Inquest," which Thomas quotes in its entirety, was not on the pages I found. I didn't like those other poems, but "The Inquest" I did like.

I took my oath I would inquire
Without affection, hate, or wrath,
Into the death of Ada Wright--
So help me God! I took that oath.

When I went out to see the corpse,
The four months' babe that died so young,
I judged it was seven pounds in weight,
And little more than one foot long.

One eye, that had a yellow lid,
Was shut--so was the mouth, that smiled;
The left eye open, shining bright--
It seemed a knowing little child.

For as I looked at that one eye,
It seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
"What caused my death you'll never know--
Perhaps my mother murdered me."

When I went into court again,
To hear the mother's evidence--
It was a love-child, she explained,
And smiled, for our intelligence.

"Now, Gentlemen of the Jury," said
The coroner--"this woman's child
By misadventure met its death."
"Aye, aye" said we. The mother smiled.

And I could see that child's one eye
Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
"What caused my death you'll never know--
Perhaps my mother murdered me."

What can I say about his three long poems that Thomas quotes in the almost final chapter. I tried to read them as he suggests poetry be read, enjoying the words if not the sense of what is written. And I did enjoy the words. They are beautiful. But I crave sense.

I enjoyed, a great deal more than I did these poems, his prose description of his "long 'poem in preparation'" which immediately precedes them. The poem was to be called "In Country Heaven," and I believe it was never finished.

Who needs a poem when we have, "The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face.... They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance, and mysteries, all we know and do not know."

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Fish-frailed, netbagged, umbrella’d, pixie-capped, fur-shoed, blue-nosed, puce-lipped, blinkered like drayhorses, scarved, mittened, galoshed, wearing everything but the cat’s blanket, crushes of shopping-women crunched in the little Lapland of the once grey drab street, blew and queued and yearned for hot tea, as I began my search through Swansea town cold and early on that wicked February morning.”

Dylan Thomas was a great one for the linguacious stream, wallowing and luxuriating in cascades of words – especially when voiced out loud, as in this selection of his radio pieces.

Each was originally broadcast by the BBC, the autobiographical stories specifically for the Welsh Home Service. I vaguely remember listening to some of them as a child – particularly 'Memories of Christmas', in which “all the Christmases roll down the hill towards the Welsh-speaking sea, like a snowball growing whiter and bigger and rounder, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find; holly or robins or pudding, squabbles and carols and oranges and tin whistles...”

He had an eye for both the ordinary and the odd and conjures them together in a rich and satisfying way. Wonderful stuff. But it’s a book of two halves. Part Two contains (as the introduction says) “talks of a more didactic nature, together with extracts culled from radio discussions”. It’s a recipe for a comparatively damp squib – and sadly that’s what we get.

Great writer – but not a great selection of his work.

[Joanna Lee]

I'm just going to highlight some really nice quotes from the book (some parts of poems, and some parts of his prose):

"...the shape of another country lies so near,
the wind on Dover Cliffs could touch it with its finger.

And from this island-end, white-faced over the shifting sea-dyes,
a man may hear his country's body talking, and be caught
in the weathers of her eyes." --Our Country

"You cannot generalize about age and poetry. A man's poems, if they are good poems, are always older than himself; and sometimes they are ageless. We know that the shape and the texture of his poems would always be restlessly changing, though the purpose behind them would surely remain unalterable; he would always be experimenting technically, deeper and deeper driving towards the final intensity of language: the words behind words."

"Seldom drink wine, and yet sometimes do, lest being enforced to drink upon the sudden you should find yourself inflamed. Be courteous of gesture and affable to all men, with diversity of reverences according to the dignity of the person: there is nothing that winneth so much for so little cost. Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father if you find not yourself most able in wit and body and to do anything when you be most merry: but let your mirth be every void of all scurrility and biting words to any man." --Sir Henry, a letter to his son.

"Poetry, to a poet, is the most rewarding work in the world. 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 and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him...

What's more, a poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at an expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth."

[Nancy Oyula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allow me say how I enjoyed reading the poem "Hunchback in the park". I could picture the old man in my mind. Him sitting on a bench in a park I imagined, with his back facing me (Or rather Dylan Thomas). Everyday. I loved the author's lines. His childhood memories, trip to America, and his view on Welsh Poets is what stood out for me in the book.
This is a nice pick for lovers of poetry. I loved the arrangement of the text and style of writing. I’d recommend it to anyone, not just poetry lovers. There’s more than a handful to know about Welsh poets. You can read and share so much in this book, and perhaps criticize if you feel like it.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mash-up of autobiographical short stories, radio broadcasts and lectures: a collection of short prose pieces with much poetry quoted (as well as poetical prose) by a literary and linguistic giant. Loved it when he referred to "the bilingual sea" off the Welsh coast.

[Mason Barlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A silent hullabaloo of balloons.'

[Skye Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely blown away, I started this a couple of years ago and got distracted by other books but I found myself thinking of the school yard and truant boy a lot. Glad I read the rest of it.
(not sure i read this exact copy as mine was a 1974 publish that included Preface
Part 1
Reminiscences of Childhood (First Version)
Reminiscences of Childhood (Second Version)
Quite Early One Morning
Memories of Christmas
Holiday Memory
How to begin a Story
The Crumbs of One Man's Year
The Festival Exhibition, 1951
The International Eisteddfod
A Visit to America
Laugharne
Return Journey
Wilfred Owen
Walter de la Mare as a Prose Writer
Sir Philip Sidney
A Dearth of Comic Writers
The English Festival of Spoken Poetry
On Reading One's Own Poems
Welsh Poets
Wales and the Artist
Three Poems
On Poetry
Notes
Thank you for the person who typed all that out and in the reviews for this already, glad to keep note)

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a master of commas and hyphens, a man whose commentary on the social world is largely unrivaled in the 20th Century, this particular collection is so disjointed and scatterbrained as to leave me disappointed not in Dylan Thomas as much as the choice he and others made, near the end of his life, to gather up this particular set up of essays into one volume. As always with a Thomas work, there are priceless passages that warrant an underline, but they come so few and far between as to merit a few yawns of distracted readership.

[JLucasey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved A Child’s Christmas in Wales, of course. The last fifty pages or so consisted of lot of disjointed extracts and articles by Thomas that felt sort of haphazardly cobbled together. so I skimmed. Only really worth reading if you already take particular relish in Dylan Thomas, which I don’t, I think, beyond Child’s Christmas and famous poems. His writing style sort of makes my brain feel like a dice being shaken about inside a cup, or like I’m at work, standing at the register, feverishly checking out more random items to a person than my mind could ever individually process.

[Justin Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be honest. Poetry is something I am never quite sure I will be able to grasp or enjoy... And I have been tryin for years. It's interesting learning more about Thomas and being able to say I have attempted his work. But it felt like word salad for the most part and my ADHD brain just could not focus well enough to handle all the words being thrown at me. This book could take several more reads for me to really grasp it.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s some interesting and varied stuff in this book, but nothing extraordinary.

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains A Child's Christmas in Wales, which was great. The rest is a bit of a rag tag of transcripts from readings and odd pieces of journalism.

[Ursula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts I loved but some bits had little impact

[Chiefdonkey Bradey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave this book when I was 15 years old to my dad for his birthday- the memory of mornings in Palmyra Road - the beauty and richness and melancholy of what I've must read - sweeps over me

[Clare Hawthorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white horsed and full of fishes."
- Reminisces of Childhood, 1943.

[Jack Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bro really likes listing stuff .. same!

[Mary Dayhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love stories. have a difficult time understanding some of the other parts.

[Coralec · Rating 5 out of 5]

At his best

[Colin Lavery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought this because I hadn't read anything by him before and the only other books I could find by him were entire poetry collections. I can't think of many poets or authors that have such a command and awareness of rhythm and sound in poetry/prose, and it was interesting to read his own accounts of what poetry should be in some of the essays near the end. That said, I was a bit underwhelmed by his range of topics and I was not overly impressed by his short stories.

[Craig Barner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dylan Thomas was a word drunk before he was a beverage drunk. His superb verbosity is a delight to read. Moderns are obsessed with succinctness, spareness and the less-is-more philosophy. Dylan Thomas would have nothing to do with such silliness as it applied to his writing. And the succinctness-is-all attitude can be silliness. Poetry and the prose of a poet should be an overflowing of passion. His love of words is evident throughout "Quite Early One Morning." I was hooked on the work's first sentence:

"I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned, jerry-villa'd, and smug-suburbed by the side of a long and splendid-curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old anonymous men, in the tatters and hangovers of a hundred charity suits, beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock-bound boats, threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs, and, on Saturday summer afternoons, listened to the militant music of salvation and hell-fire preached from a soap-box."

Thomas's reminiscences of Swansea and other parts of Wales are wonderful. I loved his memories of a Swansea park. His other essays cover great writers (Wilfred Owen, Philip Sidney and not-so-well-known-as-Thomas Welsh poets, among others), academic stuffed shirts and other topics. I loved the essay "A Visit to America." He prods European academics for their frivolousness and their American listeners for the same thing.

A couple of Thomas's poems are included in the volume. Unlike his essays, Dylan Thomas's poetry is something that eludes me. His poetry's strongest notes are violence and powerfully suggestive obscurity. A superficial reading is not enough to digest Dylan Thomas's poetry. They must be studied and contemplated.

[Vicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was quite excited for the rest of this book after I finished the first story and saw that the table of contents promised essays about reading one's own poems, how to write poetry, on poetry and etc, but then between the first and second sections, I lost interest from how often Dylan Thomas feels like he needs to play with a phrase to make it interesting or something—

"And of what has gone I know only shilly-shally snatches and freckled plaids, flecks and dabs, dazzle and froth; a simple second caught in coursing snow-light; an instant, gay or sorry, struck motionless in the curve of flight like a bird or a scythe; the spindrift leaf and stray-paper whirl, canter, quarrel and people-chase of everybody's street; suddenly the way the grotesque wind slashes and freezes at a corner the clothes of a passer-by so that she stays remembered, cold and still until the world like a night light in a nursery goes out; and a waddling couple of the small occurrences, comic as ducks, that quack their way through our calamitous days; whits and dots and tittles."

Not to say I don't like that sentence a lot. Not at all.

The essays on poetry are my favorite, as well as
the first few stories on childhood and holidays.

[Len · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this a long time ago. Quite Early One Morning stands out as the precursor to Under Milk Wood but it is the short essay on the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen that is astonishing. It is a lesson in essay writing and should be read be all those who have an ambition to write and express themselves.

[Web Ruble · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no writer like Dylan Thomas. His lyric prose are as good as his poetry. Not only does his stuff show the richness of the soul of Wales, but it stirs the souls of the Irish, British, and even us Americans.