Poet Thomas was schoolboy plagiarist, publisher claims

The young Dylan Thomas was a serial plagiarist who frequently wrote “audacious rip-offs” of others’ work, a lifelong admirer of the Welsh poet has claimed.

- ROISIN O'CONNOR

Publisher and Italian translator Alessandro Gallenzi says he has identified at least a dozen examples of plagiarised poems, arguing that the scale of the alleged theft is greater than previously understood.

Thomas, whose masterpieces include 1953's Under Milk Wood and 1951's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", is known to have plagiarised other works for one or two of his early poems. However, Gallenzi argues in an essay for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) that 10 poems published under Thomas's name in his school magazine, along with two poems published in the Swansea newspaper The Herald of Wales, were ripoffs of work by other writers.

Thomas began attending Swansea Grammar School, where his father taught English and oversaw the institution's magazine, in 1925, shortly before his 11th birthday. He is widely acknowledged to have shown a precocious talent from an unusually young age, despite being unruly and an underachiever in subjects other than English.