A guided walking tour last weekened of ten places in Greenwich Village associated with the 'rock-star' Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who took New York by storm in the 1950s, highlighted the sixtieth anniversary of Thomas’ appearance on the American scene.

 Led by two Welsh-born guides, and organized by the Welsh Assembly Government, the tour began at the Church of St Luke, on Hudson Street, where Thomas’ funeral was held, and wound through the streets of lower Manhattan to places where his work was read aloud, where he stayed, and where he drank.

 Drinking figures prominently in Thomas’ story – both as acknowledged by guides Ianto Roberts and Thomas specialist Peter Stead, and in the seminal book about the poet’s sojourn in America, penned by his principle host and guide, John Malcolm Brinnin. From the moment the Welshman got off the plan at Idlewild, his bouts with excessive drinking were the order of business, and the context from which his remarkable oral performances of his own poetry and the poetry of others stand out.

 During his day, Dylan Thomas was widely considered a giant of 20th century poetry, courted during his time in America by the likes of WH Auden, John Berryman and ee cummings. Fitting easily into the ‘bad boy’ mold filled a decade later by Brendan Behan, the Irish poet and legitimate “Borstal Boy,” Thomas was from a middle class family and precociously talented as a writer at an early age. By the time he reached America in 1950, his reputation had preceded him and his whirlwind reception in New York before his death three years later at St Vincent’s Hospital was marked by a combination of awe, devotion and horror. He toured the major universities of America, but was kept at arms’ length from the co-eds. His combination of angelic innocence and soul-numbing debauchery got him kicked out of private parties and removed from hotels.

 Through it all, however, the Welsh writer’s overwhelming talent as a writer – author of such great works as Fern Hill, Poem in October, and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – and his undeniable oral genius made him a fixture in the public’s eye between 1950 and 1953.

 Through it all, he cavorted amiably with dockworkers and undergraduates, scholars and street poets.

 This was the theme for Roberts and Stead, who conducted a crew of 20 or so Thomas devotees through the streets of Manhattan Sunday on a tour designed by no less a figure than Dylan Thomas’ own daughter, Aeronwy. A fine poet in her own right prior to her untimely death last year, Aeronwy Thomas chose the sights for the tour when she was in the NY Metropolitan area a year or so ago, visiting a number of poetry communities including here on Long Island.

 Included were such locations as St Luke’s, the Cherry Lane Theater on Commerce Street, the Washington Square Hotel (once known as the Hotel Earle, and the location where Thomas stayed after being kicked out of the Beekman), Minetta Tavern, and the White Horse Tavern. “The Horse,” as Thomas referred to it, is the most visibly a site, with an entire room in the old musty inn festooned with pictures of the precocious Welshman, and a suitable ‘single-shot’ location to visit for anyone trying to absorb the feel for 1950s New York City, as Dylan Thomas experienced it.