The extraordinary allure of all things connected to Dylan Thomas has left a powerful cultural trace around the globe.

Bob Dylan likes to deny it, but it is as near as certain that, around 1962, he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman after reading Thomas. Although Thomas had been dead for less than a decade, his memory was already assuming mythic proportions among American beats as the archetypal romantic poet who lived his life to excess and died for his art.

It was the Beatles who cemented Thomas’s position as counter-cultural icon by including his portrait among the motley crew on the cover of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Since then the reputation of the self-styled “Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive” has wavered but recently it has been enjoying a somewhat incongruous revival as an offshoot of contemporary celebrity culture.

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Pierce Brosnan have called their sons Dylan. One can understand the homesick Mrs Michael Douglas in Hollywood yearning for a whiff of Swansea Bay, but the Irish former James Bond?

It appears that he is a genuine fan. His son is called Dylan Thomas Brosnan. And Brosnan himself is one of several people who have been or are making films based on the Welsh bard’s life. The Edge of Love came out this year, Brosnan’s version is in production, and Mick Jagger’s Jagged Films has been poring over a script for some time.

Commentators have sneered that Thomas’s renaissance is for people who don’t read poetry, but his allure remains unchallenged. Dylan Thomas is a modern Byron, a charismatic figure whose stormy but passionate marriage is the template for every Primrose Hill rock-star ménage. And for all his unappealing personal habits, he was artistically the real thing, someone who, in his own words, devoted his life to his “craft or sullen art”.

Andrew Lycett is the author of Dylan Thomas: A New Life, published by Phoenix

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