Dylan Thomas Books

This "collected poems 1934-1953" has 2 poems that "collected poems 1934-1952" (which has all poems Dylan himself wished to be included at that time, 1952) doesn't have: "In Country Heaven" and "Elegy". Former was intended by him to be included in some future collection and latter, this is the last, but unfinished poem Dylan ever wrote.

This is an annotated edition of the collective poems which provides much helpful background information on the composition of the poems. It does not however provide any kind of systematic interpretation of the poems. The notes are placed at the back of the book so as not to interfere with the reading of the poems.
Of the collected poems themselves I think that there are few readers and listeners of poetry in English who would quarrel with the assessment that Thomas was one of the great poets of the twentieth century , and arguably its greatest reader of poetry. His greatness as a poet has much to do with the sheer music and lyrical depth of his poetry , a soundrich beauty which often could be overwhelming. His great inventiveness linguistically and his strong sense of how to build a poem dramatically make his poetry riveting and mysterious at once. Along with Hopkins and Wallace Stevens his work seems to me the most hear-able of all English poetry in the past one hundred years.
I will give one small example of how the notes help us read the poems. The notes in discussing one of Thomas' greatest poems ' Do not go gentle into that good night' describe Thomas father as an atheist who when it rained raged and blasted and blamed God for it. He was a person of integrity and strength , clearly a man of powerful feeling. Thomas great and moving lines the last stanza (' And you, my father, there on the sad height./ Curse, bless , me now with your fierce tears. I pray. / Do not gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.) are better understood when we have this sense of how his father seem to inspire him to great poetry.

The correct title of this poem is: HEARING YOU READ, SEEING YOU IN THE IVY/ AT LAUGHARNE GRAVEYARD,/ THEY ASK TO READ WHAT YOU'VE WRITTEN.

The poem explores setting out, beginning,apprenticeship. Basic jobs of the called poet. It is a pilgrimage. The young poet visits the ancestor, Dylan Thomas. "These children hear you,//no mother keeps them in bed." Barry Grimes, setting out, a child of his times--the 60's--accepts the responsibility of the poet at the same time that he declines to do things as they've been done in the past.

"Each is a presence before either is a word," the poet writes. This isn't going to be a short story. If you can't break through the mask you will neither be listened to, nor heard.

How different than things are today, 2005.

This letterpressed broadside, the first publication from Blue Begonia Press, is itself a kind of beginning. Printed in winter, the old swinging garage door still claiming, "This place is for cars," not closing properly, almost obstinate in its crooked swinging and hanging. No insulation in this press either, and it shows in the stiff ink.

The broadside itself reportedly went through several printings. No count of the edition was made. Grimes signed none of the broadsides. Printing is so-so, but the printer knows nothing yet about leading.

"Children lesten when they know they aren't alone," Grimes writes. Grimes, a Washington State Teacher of the Year is still in the classroom today. One wonders, "repeating a repeating pattern," who the teachers of this generation will be.

jb

I first heard this recording from a Boston Public Library LP in 1969. It is the perfect fusion of a great humorist and a great reader. Storytelling at its best.

I am so happy it is available!

Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little piece sticks in my mind better than any other Christmas story I've ever read. Between drunk Auntie Hannah singing in the backyard and the haunted house down the streets where a group of mischievous carollers get the living hell scared out of them, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening. Keep a bowl of candy nearby when you read it.

William T. Moynihan says that this study is only for those who believe that Thomas at very least wrote a handful of great poems. Drawing on previous studies and especially on Thomas letters Moynihan illuminates the work of Thomas. He shows how Thomas is often an unreliable reader of his own poetry, and also makes a strong case for Thomas a deeply religious poet. He connects the ' life force' in Thomas with that in D.H. Lawrence shows Thomas connection to the Welsh countryside and bardic tradition.He also shows how conscienscious a craftsman Thomas was and how he fashioned in his collected poems a work of great symbolic and mythic unity. In his summary Moynihan maintains that one year before his death Thomas 'had, for all practical purposes completed his vision of the human condition, the unity of birth, fall and regeneration. Imperfect, truncated, and ambiguous in many particulars, 'Collected Poems' nevertheless marks a completed esthetic. The highly imaginative existence revealed in this esthetic together with his singular importance as a neo- romantic poetand his score of superb lyric poems, mark Dylan Thomas as one of a half dozen major poets writing in English in the first half of our century."
This is a very rich study and will be of considerable help to readers of Thomas.

Having read John Malcolm Brinnin's account of Dylan Thomas in America and Caitlin Thomas's autobiographical work LEFTOVER LIFE TO KILL I find this biography fair and comprehensive. It contains appropriate scholarly apparatus. Both Dylan and his sister Nancy had great imaginations. Dylan's father came from a rural family. He became a schoolmaster. He grew to be an unhappy man. Thomas poems are songs about mysteries without solution. They are melancholy, Celtic, non-English. Thomas denied the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He liked technical virtuousity. In school he was protected by being his father's son.

In 1935 he met Vernon Watkins and came to respect him as a poet and as a critic. Thomas also came to know Geoffrey Grigson, Norman Cameron, and A.J.P. Taylor. The idea developed that Thomas needed to be protected from women and drink and that he had difficulty with his lungs, bronchitis. Pamela Hansford Johnson was a girlfriend in the early years. In 1936 Edith Sitwell became Thomas's chief advocate.

In 1936 he met Caitlin. They married in 1937. As he grew older he wrote less quickly. By age twenty one he had written half of the poems in his COLLECTED POEMS. He wrote surrealist stories and reviews for which he was paid poorly. Caitlin was buxom and he was thin. In 1938 they went to Laugharne. For Thomas Wales was a place and a frame of mind. The reader is struck by how early in Dylan Thomas's career themes menacing survival surfaced. There are issues of poverty, drink, work for the BBC, revision of work to evade censors, and merry times in London versus periods of restraint and work in Wales. Stories for PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG and ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE were set out and virtually completed when Thomas was in his early twenties.

Thomas managed to avoid service during World War II. The war interferred with the sale of his writings. He wrote film scripts. The work was facile. John Davenport felt that he had lost his lyrical gift and was left with nothing but a public personality.

Poetry returned at the end of the war. "Fern Hill" dates from 1945. UNDER MILK WOOD and "A Child's Christmas in Wales" were started. After the war he ws able to work for the Third Programme for the BBC. Roy Campbell found him to be the best reader. He was in demand as an actor and speaker. Edith Sitwell was aghast that he wanted to go to America. For the time being the family went to Italy.

In 1949 the Boat House at Laugharne came on the market. Dylan often spoke of dying young. Caitlin felt that he was never too keen on life. The family moved to the Boat House in 1949. "Over Sir John's hill" was produced. It was related to "Fern Hill" and "Poem in October."

Dylan received the long awaited invitation to America. UNDER MILK WOOD was still largely unwritten. He lived an eccentric life there without paying much attention to the country. His guide and advisor was John Malcom Brinnin. His reading while on the tour at Mount Hoyoke was described as a miracle. Once reading he took hold of himself. In 1950 Dylan Thomas's writing was more highly regarded than it was later.

Little of the money earned in America in 1950 found its way to Wales. In 1951 "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" was addressed to his father who was ill. Dylan and Caitlin arrived in America in January 1952. The visit was part farce, part tragedy. Social occasions were difficult. Dylan's favorite bar in New York City was the White Horse Tavern. Dylan and Caitlin stayed in the Chelsea Hotel.

Thomas entered into an agreement with Caedmon, a company started by two alert young women, and recorded "A Child's Christmas in Wales." COLLECTED POEMS 1934-1952 was published in November. The review that most pleased Dylan was by Stephen Spender. For understanding the magic of the poet's function Dylan was indebted to his father who was now dying.

In 1953, contrary to legend, Dylan was not really a penniless poet. He was, however, always uncertain of his powers, always consumed with his littleness. He returned to America in April 1953. He was still working on UNDER MILK WOOD. He returned to England in June. Milk Wood revisions dragged on through the summer.

In October 1953 Dylan returned to New York. His troubles had begun long before. His father and his sister died that year. He, too, was to die. Morphine, insult to the brain, something triggered the coma from which he did not emerge.

This collection of critical essays edited by C.B. Cox is an especially fine one. It includes essays by John Wain, David Daiches, John Ackerman, Elder Olson, Winifed Nowottny, Ralph Maud, William Empson, Raymond Williams, David Holbrook, Annis Pratt, Robert M.Adams , John Bayley, Karl Shapiro.
I found especially interesting "The Welsh Background" by John Ackerman. He speaks of the way Thomas who did not know Welsh shared much with his Welsh contemporaries , above all, Vernon Watkins. He speaks of the Romantic element in Thomas, the introspective, the wildly original. Thomas burst upon the scene in the thirties a voice very much different from the prevailing Eliot- Yeats- Auden spirit of the time.
In a sense the most moving essay is the one by Karl Shapiro written shortly after Thomas' death at the age of thirty- nine. Fellow poet Shapiro knows the canon of Thomas poetry and selects thirty of the poems as those he believes will truly stand the test of time (Thomas wrote "I advance for as long as forever is ")
The poems Shapiro selects are"
" I see the boys of summer", " A process in the weather of the heart","The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", "Especially when the October wind"," When, like a running grave", "Light breaks where no sun shines", "Do you not father me", " A grief ago", "And death shall have no dominion", "Then was my neophyte", "When all my five and country senses see"" We lying by seas and sand" "It is the sinners' dust- tongued bell"," After the funeral", "Not from this anger", "How shall my animal", "Twenty- four years", " A refusal to mourn", "Poem in October", "The Hunchback in the Park"" Into her lying down head" " Do not go gentle" " A Winter's Tale" " On the Marriage of a Virgin" " When I woke" "Among those killed in the dawn raid" "Fern Hill" "In country sleep", "Over the John's Hill" "Poem on his Birthday".
Shapiro discusses Thomas' major themes, of his moving " between sexual revulsion and sexual ecstasy, between puritanism and mysticism, between formalistic ritual ( this accounts for his lack of invention) and vagueness." Wain writes of " the note of doom in the midst of present pleasure, for concealed in each moment lie change and death." He discusses the difference between the obscure early poems and those of the more mature later poems. Wain speaks of a progress from a period in which "techniques of identification pressed too far through a period of occasional verse.. to a period of more limpid , open- worked poetry in which instead of endeavouring to leap outside time into a pantheistic cosmos beyond the dimensions, he accepts time and change and uses memory as an elegaic device".
This book throws light on a wide variety of aspects of the bard whose voice and presence powerfully moved his listeners and readers.
There is a Jewish teaching "that the evil are dead in their lives, while the righteous live after their death" Perhaps of Thomas it can be said as a poet" After the first life there truly is another"

From the glorious cover photograph of the pensive bard to the last word of poet, prose writer and playwright Dylan Thomas' "Under Milkwood" this is a volume most fine! The soft cover edition even has a milky patina to it, as much a pleasure to hold as the words inside are to read.
All the famous poems are here: "If I were tickled by the rub of love", "And death shall have no dominion", "Fern Hill" and everything else. This is an omnibus, after all. The short stories are almost as intense as the poems. Also included are transcriptions of some of his broadcasts. And here a suggestion, get the associated recordings to round out your Dylan Thomas experience for his voice was a wonder. He had been a radio broadcaster and on tour he was an unforgettable reader and the best interpreter of his own work there has ever been.
There is also a timeline of his career. The brief biography could be longer but that is being picky for who doesn't know his life was tragically far too short. His oeuvre speaks for itself. He was the greatest meddler of words since Shakespeare. Thomas' work will be read as long as English is spoken and this volume will be cherished by anyone who loves our language, for a lifetime.

It started with his poetry when I was in high school. Imediately, I was spellbound. Then I found this collection of short stories. I cannot stop reading. I love every aspect of his "craft or sullen art." When I read his works, I feel a kind of longing and comfort. The stories in this collection were taken from books that were already published, and after reading these stories, I want to read everything Dylan Thomas ever wrote. When I see his picture, I sense a bond between him and I. I see the little boy, I see the young man; I know them. Dylan Thomas' type of writing is something all writers want to achieve. His words are completely private and honest. He is an imortal legacy.

okay, so i don't own the book, but the poem is exquisite, and i've been a fan of it since childhood. unlike the independent publisher, i don't think that children are ever too little to be exposed to poetry or art, and murray kimber's work is stunning. perhaps if they read the poem they'd figure out where the horse motif comes from. jeez, guys, maybe you could sound a bit more pompous and uninformed if you tried, but i don't see how.