In 1944, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas composed Poem in October while living in New Quay, Ceredigion, Wales, a birthday poem celebrating his thirtieth year that opens with his 'woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood / And the mussel pooled and the heron / Priested shore' — saturated with the sounds and winds of the Welsh coastal landscape. The poem was completed and published in Poetry London in 1945, and Thomas later recorded it for radio, his resonant voice making the poem's weather imagery audible. It is considered one of the finest landscape poems of the twentieth century and a defining example of Thomas's bardic Welsh poetry.

Thomas's Poem in October exemplifies the continuation of the Romantic wind-and-weather lyric tradition into the mid-twentieth century, deploying coastal wind and seasonal atmosphere as the vehicle for autobiographical and spiritual meditation in a way that connects directly to Keats's To Autumn and Wordsworth's Prelude. Thomas's influence on subsequent Welsh and British poetry — on R.S. Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and the broader school of British nature poetry — ensured that his wind-saturated Welsh landscape became a touchstone for the tradition. The poem's radio broadcast also contributed to the distinctively auditory, wind-breath quality of Thomas's influence on spoken-word and performance poetry.