A poetic comet streaked across American skies in the winter of 1950. Dylan Thomas, invited by the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, touched down at Idlewild Airport and headed straight for the airport bar to get a much-needed double Scotch and soda. Then, without further ado, he set about seducing audiences from coast to coast.

At a time when poetry readings were much less common than they are today, he stumped from city to city, college town to college town, reciting, in a mellifluous, actorly voice, his favorites by Yeats and Hardy and Lawrence, or Americans like John Crowe Ransom and Theodore Roethke, before beginning a selection of his own poems. When contemporary poets set forth on reading tours today, they follow the trail he blazed.

“He was fierce and magical, in his voice and in his presence,” said the poet Robert Kelly, who heard Thomas at City College. “He did not read like the usual poets of the day, looking at the ceiling as if communing with God, or Tennyson. He was speaking, it seemed, from his heart. He made people realize that poetry was exciting, that there was a thrill in it. I can still hear that voice.”

That thrill returns with a vengeance this weekend, as cultural organizations in Britain and the United States set the dial to Thomas, nonstop, for the centenary of his birth, on Oct. 27, 1914. In Swansea, his hometown in Wales, the Dylan Thomas Center is holding the annual Dylan Thomas Festival, beginning with the Dylathon, 36 hours of poems, letters and short stories read by Ian McKellen, Jonathan Pryce, Matthew Rhys (the star of “The Americans”) and others, including Prince Charles, who has recorded “Fern Hill” for the occasion. In London, “Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia,” a weeklong festival devoted to his time in London in the 1940s and ’50s, began on Monday.