Wales: the Domain of Dylan Thomas by John Borthwick

The lyrical Welsh bard Dylan Thomas departed this world with a rock star-like flourish half century ago in New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel. He was only 39 but since then has become, it is claimed, the world's most quoted poet after Shakespeare.

Admittedly, most of us can't recite much more than "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” or “Death shall have no dominion”, but such touchstone lines and his celebrated play, Under Milk Wood have ensured Dylan a place among the English language's finest users and losers.

Thomas has brought both cash and cachet to his homeland in such quantity that if he hadn't existed Wales Tourism would have to invent him. A cultural cottage industry is in full flight with his hometowns, Swansea (the first) and Laugharne (the last), featuring Dylan as firmly on their balance sheets as on their tourist maps.

The Dylan Thomas trail is awash with quotes, anecdotes and pub coasters. I pick it up at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea where he bawled his first unpoetic syllables in 1914. A small plaque on the house is all that distinguishes the home where the poet-to-be lived his first 20 years. Across the road are the bosky secrets of Cwmdonkin Park where he "endured, with pleasure, the first unrequited agonies of love, the first slow boiling in the belly of a bad poem."

I have a beer at his old watering hole on Wind Street, at the No Sign Bar, which is venerated as the oldest pub (established 1690) in Swansea. Close by, in the modest alley with the magnificent name, Salubrious Passage, is Dylan's Books which stocks rare editions of his works. A few blocks away beside the harbour is Dylan Thomas Square where I find, not surprisingly, a bronze statue of the poet. A literary guidebook gives it very faint praise, noting that, "The chair is a faithful likeness."

"DylanWorld" reaches its apogee in the beautifully curated collection of words and images that is the Dylan Thomas Centre. "I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is to their working" declares a caption above displays. "He looked like an unmade bed," intones a recorded voice. If the rich, mellifluous tones sound familiar, it is because they are those of the poet’s friend, actor and fellow Welshman, the late Richard Burton.

"The strangest town in Wales" was his early take on Laugharne (pronounced "Larne"), a village facing the Taf River. Beside the shoreline its 13th century castle looks like a shell-shocked Camelot. Literary pilgrims flow flow past it toward a familiar-looking, whitewashed, three-storey cottage perched by the shore – what he called "My seashaken house / On a breakneck of rocks." Here Thomas lived with his wife Caitlin and their children from 1949 until 1953.

Here, in the celebrated Boat House, manager Lorraine Scourfield shows me the parlour - polished floors with rugs, mismatched furniture, a 1950s radio that plays Dylan's own rich recitations, a catwalk balcony with views over the broad estuary.

A visit to the Boat House without a visit nearby to a little green, garage-sized shack built at an angle to the path. This was the engine-room of his muse, where Under Milk Wood and other works burst to life, Dylan's beloved "word-splashed hut" and "long tongued room."

The Writing Shed was originally the garage for the first motor car in Laugharne. A small glass panel lets us peer in on the nursery of his "fiercely belaboured lines" (as Caitlin called them). On the bookshelf is a file boldly labelled "Lives of the Great Poisoners" – a reference, as Milk Wood fans know, to the secret reading matter of the henpecked Mr Pugh, who dreams of similarly dispatching his harridan wife. In this little shed, even the poetic chaos has been artfully restored - the floor is scattered with a litter of throwaway lines.

In Under Milk Wood, his last and best-loved work, Dylan transmuted Laugharne, "this timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town", into eccentric Llareggub - Buggerall spelled backwards. It's an old worn cardigan of a village, now prospering, discretely, from the windfalls of Thomas-inspired tourism. I head to Brown's Pub, once his local - he used to give its telephone number as his own - where the shingle predictably displays a portrait of its most famous patron.

The front parlour looks as though little has changed since Dylan and Caitlin sat at their corner table, sometimes squalling "like two terrible children" (as was said of them), and at other times just enjoying a pint. The carpets and walls carry a fuggy patina that's probably worthy of heritage listing, but the atmosphere is still as warm as the beer. The weekend clientele is a mixture of walkers and locals with lilting Milk Wood accents. The juke-box goes off like thunder. Appropriately, it's the Beatles, who featured Dylan Thomas among their creative heroes on the cover of "Sergeant Peppers". Even more appropriately, the next song is by that other great Dylan bard, Bob.

"Laugharne is a lovely town, but full of creditors," the poet wrote to a friend. In order to out-step his debts he undertook four exhausting reading tours of America in his final three years. Dylan's thrilling performances and his roistering ways, along with much ardent female attention, made his tours a precursor to the ritual excesses of the invading British rock bands of a decade later. Like many of the next generation's "madmen across the water", in 1953 Thomas stayed at New York’s Chelsea Hotel. And like one other (though lesser) British talent, Sid Vicious, he did not survive the experience.

Reports of his demise are greatly exaggerated. Dylan did not drink anything near 18 straight whiskies (as the legend suggests), then say "I think that's the record" before slumping into a coma from which he never recovered. The more likely cause of his collapse was a massive dose of morphine administered by a trigger-happy physician, compounded by his own alcoholism and possible diabetes.

It is autumn and the revolving door of Welsh weather brings 14 seasons in one day. As rain begins, I turn my back on Laugharne's time-wracked castle and head up the hill to St Martin's churchyard where Dylan and Caitlin (who died in 1994) lie side-by-side. The final marker for this sublime wordsmith, a simple white cross, bears no epitaph, declining perhaps the temptation to challenge Death's dominion by having the last, genius word.

Instead, a celebratory, youthful line of his comes to my mind. It evokes Dylan's enduring dominion in language, not to mention the Welsh weather: "I rose in rainy autumn and walked abroad in a shower of all my days."