irst appeared in the Sunday Referee in 1933 in a feature column called the "Poets' Corner," edited by Victor Neuburg and Runia Sheila MacLeod. Neuburg began to award prizes to poets whose work was judged to be the finest printed in the column over a period of six months. The prize was that the Sunday Referee would publish the winning poet's work in book form. Dylan Thomas became the second recipient of the prize, which he won for the second of seven poems he published in "Poets' Corner," the poem, "The Force that through the Grass Fuse Drives the Flower." The editors had some difficulty getting Thomas' manuscript accepted by a publisher, until David Archer of the Parton Bookshop agree d to have the book printed. Five hundred copies were printed, but only 250 were bound and issued in December 1934. The remaining half, constituting the second issue, were bound and put on sale on February 21, 1936. It was praised by few because it was so obscure.In 1934 he went to live in London for a while and loved living the bohemian life style but he always came back to the welsh countryside where he would be inspired to write great poetry. His favourite place as a child and an adult to return to was his Aunts farm in the west of the welsh countryside called “Fern Hill”. This was to be the inspiration for one of his greatest poems of his career. Fern Hill is a wonderfully crafted description of how Thomas’ childhood imagination run...
