‘He was a tireless worker at the business of honing poems until they shone’Can it really be the centenary of the birth of that apple-cheeked, tousle-haired boy of a man who stares out at us, so winningly, from the portrait by Augustus John that serves as the frontispiece to the Collected Poems 1934-52? Yes, Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 and died in 1953, at the age of 39, in New York City, which means that unlike, say, W.B. Yeats, he never grew old enough to assume the appearance of a sage, even had he been blessed with the character to grow into such a role. It was a wretched death, as his agent John Malcolm Brinnin reminds us in the still very readable Dylan Thomas in America, published in 1956. Thomas was killed by years of self-abuse, having punished his body wit