In 1950, she received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University for an essay on Lawrence Durrell, the British poet and novelist.

[1][5] The final years of her life, which she devoted entirely to her writing, were divided between her homes in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and New York City, where she died in 1961.

"[3] In 2004, her poem "The Elephants Pass Carnegie Hall" was set to music by composer David Leisner in his piece A Timeless Procession.

[7][8] The program for the performance records that Leisner discovered Thomas's poems by chance at a library book sale in the late 1980s.

He describes her as a "lyrical, imaginative, spiritual-minded poet whose work simply begged me to set it to music".