The discovery was first made by Gallenzi’s editor Alex Middleton, after they were given access to one of only two known complete collections of Thomas’s school magazine in Swansea owned by Geoff Haden, president of the Dylan Thomas Society.
But after transcribing the poems and looking more closely at them, they were not all they seemed.
“My heart stopped,” said Gallenzi. “We were close to finishing the collection and we had to go back and start from scratch.”
They discovered that 12 poems published while Thomas was at school were someone else’s work – and Gallenzi said he believed there could be as many as 20 to 24.
Most are in the pages of the school magazine, but the extent of the plagiarism included His Requiem, submitted by D M Thomas of Swansea and published in the Western Mail newspaper on 14 January 1927, which dated from five years before and was a poem by Lillian Gard, first published in the Boy’s Own Paper.
“It was unlikely his readers would notice,” said Gallenzi.
“But Thomas could also be audacious – we found a poem which he managed to get published himself in Boy’s Own – and remember this was a nationally-read magazine – but was a copy of a poem already published in Boy’s Own 15 years before.”