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Even knocking out a clowning letter to New York Poet Oscar Williams, Thomas could not help writing vivid prose. On a plane trip back from New York: "It was stormy and dangerous, and only my iron will kept the big bird up; lightning looked wonderful through the little eyeholes in its underbelly; the bar was open all the way from Newfoundland; and the woman next to me was stone-deaf so I spoke to her all the way, more wildly and more wildly as the plane lurched on through dark and lion-thunder and the firewater yelled through my blood like Sioux, and she unheard all my delirium with a smile; and then the Red Indians scalped me; and then it was London; and my iron will brought the bird down safely . . ." The Dying Light. Of himself Thomas once said: "I am first class of second class." It was no deprecatory assessment—still leaving the top for Shakespeare, Dante, Milton et al. He was a wild, generous, flamboyant, unpredictable, panurgent, ribald and thirsty man who loved the company of his fellow human beings.
He was also a lonely misanthrope who saw the world and himself with intolerable clarity. After one three-day binge he groaned to a friend: "To be able to tear off my flesh, to get rid of this awful, horrifying skin we have . . ." He once wrote, melodramatically but perhaps not inaccurately: "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, downthrow and upheaval . . ." In the poems that will remain long after the last alcoholic insult to that skin he loathed, there are many victories for the angelic of the three Dylan Thomases: Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
* An excessive drinker, on and off, for years, Poe was found in a Baltimore tavern on election day in 1849. He was taken unconscious to the hospital, and died, at the age of 40, after three days of violent delirium.