Who wrote the poem 'Do not go gentle into that good night'?

The poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” was written by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Its repeated command to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” makes it one of the most recognizable poems about death, resistance, and grief in modern English literature.

Thomas wrote the poem in 1947 while visiting Florence with his family. It was first published in the literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and later appeared in his collections In Country Sleep and Collected Poems, 1934–1952. The poem is addressed in its final stanza to Thomas’s father, though his father did not die until 1952, after the poem had been published.

Its tightly repeating structure is a villanelle: five three-line stanzas followed by a four-line stanza, for 19 lines total. Two refrains return throughout, while two rhyme sounds bind the poem together. A common mistake is to treat the title as separate from the poem; it is simply the poem’s first line, which also functions as one of its refrains. The work is also famously quoted in the film Interstellar.