“Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle written by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 1951. With this poem, Thomas pretty much single-handedly revived the villanelle, which had first emerged in 17th-century France and reached the apex of its popularity in the British 1890s. As a highly structured poetic form, the villanelle fell out of fashion with the modernist poets of the early 20th century. But Thomas resurrected the villanelle to great effect in the mid century, producing a poem that famously stands in defiance of death through its command: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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