A 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.
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 rip-offs 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 regarded as having shown a precocious talent from an unusually young age, despite being unruly and an underachiever in subjects other than English.
But Gallenzi said that when he attempted to track down all of Thomas’s early poems for a new book, he made his “shocking” discovery.
The “lifelong admirer” of Thomas and his poetry said that many of the poems Thomas plagiarised were published in Boy’s Own Paper, the long-running periodical popular with teenage boys at the time.
Thomas’s witty ballad “His Repertoire”, supposedly written by a 12-year-old Thomas in December 1926, is allegedly an “almost verbatim” reproduction of “The Only Piece He Knew”, a poem by Archibald JA Wilson.
“The Second Best” by Helen Elrington purportedly reappeared in the school magazine under Thomas’s name, as did “The Watchers”, about those killed in the war, which was apparently written by another Boy’s Own contributor, Charles Ingram Stanley, instead of Thomas.
“He had not simply drawn inspiration from other texts, imitated or parodied them, as he later claimed; he had stolen the work of other authors wholesale, at times changing the title or a few words, perhaps to dodge detection,” Mr Gallenzi wrote in his TLS essay.
He told The Times that he and his team had confirmed plagiarism in 12 poems published between December 1926 and July 1931, but added that they suspected “another dozen” had been lifted from other authors.
All 24 will appear under a section titled “The Plagiarised and Dubious Poems” in a new edition of Thomas’s poetry, which will be published by Alma Books later this month.
Mr Gallenzi said that while he was “shocked” and “upset” at the discovery, he did not believe it would ruin the reputation of the rest of Thomas’s work.
“He was an experimental modernist poet, someone who left his mark for the incredible originality of his rhythms,” he said. “But from a personal point of view, it’s very disappointing to discover the hoodwinking of his peers and family.”
Questioning why Thomas would bother plagiarising at the same time as publishing some of his most interesting and original poems, he suggested it could have been “an elaborate hoax that went too far”.
“It could have been a way to gain recognition, first and foremost from his father, a master of English, who was a severe man,” he said.
Geoff Haden, who runs the Dylan Thomas Birthplace, called the discoveries “very significant” and agreed with Mr Gallenzi’s theory that the young poet was “desperately trying to gain approval from his father”.
Regardless of Thomas’s motives, Mr Gallenzi said that the evidence he had found would “revolutionise our thinking of Dylan Thomas’s formative years”, forcing a reassessment of the “entire early output” of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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