Dylan Thomas has always being a man trapped between eras, very difficult to pin-down, far from easily definable, charmingly elusive. His origins are murky, perhaps not murky in fact but murky in attempting to ascertain his influences, in attempting to pinpoint where his Muses flock. By the age of four the young Dylan was supposed to be able to recite some Shakespeare that his father force fed him, this smacks of a fatherly blindness, perhaps bestowing the lofty ideals that had eluded him on his burgeoning alter ego. Not that the bodily alter ego would have minded, indeed the apprentice would much better the master, Dylan would go global by creating a brand and whether it was true or not was besides the point. To think like that though, more often than not leads to living like that and Dylan lived the extreme life of the stock poet. Of course there were illusions, although seemingly possessing almost nothing, Thomas was fond of bourgeois sensibilities, he was driven around, was a member of  a West End gentleman's club and his son attended boarding school. Dylan was constantly inventing himself, friends and close acquaintances often having very different interpretations of who exactly he was. But it is not the greatest of offences, for a poet who was attempting to interpret the world, his life was very parochial, it forced him to invent, if not for his life, definitely for his poetry. We are left with a fine body of work and that is what is most important, we can sift through that for what Dylan was or was not, indeed is was said about him that his reality was his poetry while his life was his unreality.