The original Dylan

The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter read, in his own words, ‘indiscriminatingly and all the time, with my eyes hanging out on stalks’. Doesn’t sound like a dyslexic child to me, though doubtless the experts know better. Also in the news recently was the announcement of a Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £50,000 to the winner. Considering that having failed to file a tax return for years before the Inland Revenue caught up with him and sank its claws in so deeply that from 1948 to his death in November 1953 ‘he was never, for a single day’, according to his biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon, ‘free of financial terror’, the value of this prize seems like a bad joke.