Every Welsh poet has to rebel against Dylan Thomas and RS Thomas - the fathers. Every pub and coffee house had its own Dylan Thomas anecdote and every single visitor east of Newport got treated to the 5 Cwmdonkin Drive-by experience. There's always a worry that he'll end up being little more than a piece of cultural collateral for the tourism industry, but on the evidence of the audiences for the recent production of Under Milk Wood, the faithful will always turn out for the greatest hits.M. Then I read "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" for BBC2 the other day and suddenly I thought, it doesn't need to be a man.Iestyn George, 37, journalist and broadcasterIn the jumble of childhood memories it is the blue plaque attached to Dylan Thomas's place of birth that fits in somewhere with the cover of the Beatles' Rubber Soul, the Apollo 11 moon landing and the signature tune to White Horses Dylan was right up there with John, Paul, Neil and Jacky. Then, later, working with Michael Bogdanov on Under Milk Wood we found a freer, lighter side to the text It could be ironic, funny even. I played the second voice, which is traditionally male but works really well as a woman.

Lovely though those are, they are all the same booming, resonant deep Welsh voice, very much of its time.In New York I did a tribute performance in the Chelsea Hotel bar, where he used to spend a lot of time. I was asked to step in when Bryn Terfel couldn't perform "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" - but I thought, "No, I can't, my voice isn't big enough, I'm not big enough - I can't read this poem, a man should." I can't believe I refused. They were teaching it as if it were continuous with the Welsh tradition of [the 14th-century poet] Dafydd ap Gwilym. It's the language that I connect with - I can't really focus on ethnic purity in that way; it makes me nervous. People floated towards "Fern Hill" and the later poems because the structure is mellifluous and kind of normal The earlier stuff is much more opaque and mysterious That's what I like. As to the Thomas heritage industry: ouch!Nia Roberts, 31, actorAlthough I first encountered Thomas through my mother, who used to perform extracts, I grew up thinking of him as a male voice. At home we had recordings of Thomas reading his work, Burton reading it, Hopkins reading it.

What I got out of it was a lot of noise, like good, fresh advertising copy It riveted my brain I was stunned. As to how I felt I was supposed to respond, "pride" is the answer. His work offers so many temptations to romanticise and sentimentalise. But if we can focus on his very real strengths - his sheer love of language, his effortless mixing of the vernacular and literary and, above all, the basic fact, so often obscured, that in his work he was always for modernism and never for the false comforts of "heritage" - then beneath the Celtic reprobate shtick we can find something of value to all of us as Welsh writers. Even to an unreconstructed child of Sixties modernism like me.John Williams's latest novel is 'The Prince of Wales' (Bloomsbury, £9.99)Dylan and me, tooJohn Cale, 61, musician, set several of Thomas's poems to musicDylan was taught in Wales in the Fifties in a peculiarly cross-cultural way - and I use the word "peculiar" advisedly. Clearly, the shadow he has cast over poets writing in Wales over the past half century has been huge.