Dylan Thomas

Walford Davies

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781783160587
• eBook ISBN: 9781783161522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory
• 2. ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia
• 3. ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work
• 4. ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose
• 5. ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change
• 6. ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems
• 7. ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’
• 8. ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war
• 9. ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts
• 10. ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies
• 11. ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond
• 12. ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood
• 13. ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet
• 14. ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems
• 15. ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man
• Notes
• Select Bibliography