“Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.” So wrote Dylan Thomas in a widely quoted letter to a childhood friend in 1932. In celebration of the first Dylan Day or - to give it its full title - International Dylan Thomas Day, the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke makes an eloquent case for his importance to Wales and to her, but how important is he internationally and to you? And what lines you would cite to demonstrate that, 61 years after his death, he is no ordinary fool (and more than the sum of his alcoholic aphorisms)?
It’s easy to fall back on Under Milk Wood and Death Shall Have no Dominion, but here are some less well known examples to start you off:
Once It Was The Colour Of Saying
Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing
Love In The Asylum
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Now over to you. Tell us in the comments below or by tweeting @guardianbooks. You can also follow the action on the official Dylan Day hashtag #dylanday.
