Dylan Thomas repeatedly ‘plagiarized other poets’ as a schoolboy.

According to an author and publicist who has conducted extensive research on the early works of the iconic Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas copied the work of other poets and published it under his name while still a schoolboy.

Alessandro Galenzi discovered shocking plagiarism, which he described as “wholesale”, while he was editing a new collection of Thomas’s poetry.

The young Thomas was an enthusiastic contributor to the magazine of Swansea Grammar School after joining it at the age of 11 in 1925, but Galenzi found at least a dozen instances where Thomas had wholesale copied work published in other magazines.

“It’s incredibly interesting from a biographical, personal and psychological standpoint,” he said.

The discovery was first made by Alex Middleton, editor of Galenzi, when he was provided access to one of only two known complete archives of Thomas’s school magazine in Swansea, owned by Geoff Hadden, president of the Dylan Thomas Society.

But transcribing the poems and looking at them closely revealed that they were not what they seemed.

Galenzi expressed, “My heart shattered.” “We were close to finishing the collection and had to go back and start over.”

They found that 12 of the poems published while Thomas was at the school were the work of someone else – and Galenzi said he believed there could be as many as 20 to 24.

Most were in the pages of the school magazine, but the range of plagiarism included His Requiem, submitted by DM Thomas of Swansea and published in the Western Mail newspaper on 14 January 1927, which was five years earlier, and a poem by Lilian Guard, first published in the Boys’ Own Paper.

“It was unlikely that his readers would pay attention,” Galenzi said.

“But Thomas could also be audacious – we found a poem he managed to get published in Boy’s Own himself – and remember, this was a nationally read magazine – but it was a copy of a poem published in Boy’s Own 15 years earlier.”

• Born in Swansea on 27 October 1914, Thomas was the son of an English teacher and a seamstress.
• He started writing poetry while still at school and became a reporter on the Swansea Daily Post.
• When his first poetry collection was published in 1934, he went to London.
• He married Caitlin McNamara in 1937 and they lived in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, with a strained relationship.
• His collection of stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, was published in 1940.
• His best-known poems include Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Reflections on Death, and Dating 1947.
• His play Under Milk Wood was first read on stage in New York in May 1953.
• Dylan collapsed and later died in hospital on 9 November 1953. He was buried at Laugharne.

Galenzi said, “The interesting question is why he did it and trying to understand it.”

He believes this may have been due to insecurity and an attempt to attract attention and was helped by the fact that Thomas could get away with it.

They said Thomas had started a new, much bigger school and may have been trying to stand out or impress his fellow students. He published his first poem in the school magazine in his first year and later edited the publication.

Another factor, Galenzi said, was probably the presence of Thomas’s father, who was an English teacher at the school and had ambitions for his son.

The young Thomas also began writing his own poetry and there is an overlap between his original and plagiarised work.

Galenzi said, “She found her voice and her voice is unique.”

The plagiarised work now finds its place in the appendix of the upcoming collection Dylan Thomas – The Complete Poems.

Galenzi said in his editor’s introduction that they “revealed his moodiness, ambition and, perhaps, naïveté at the time when he was beginning as a poet”.

Some poems from the school magazine – along with the Boy’s Own original – will be on display from this weekend at Dylan’s Birthplace Museum, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea.

Museum curator Geoff Hadden said he was not surprised by the revelation, as he was aware of some instances of plagiarism by schoolboy Thomas.

“The more I look at it, the more obvious it becomes,” Haden said.

“I think he wanted to show his dad something and get him to stop bothering him with homework in other subjects.”