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.
Review “Walford Davies’s sympathetic introduction to the character and writing of Dylan Thomas, one of the great twentieth-century poets, is illuminating for new or experienced readers. His appraisal and close readings are warmly personal, rooted in Welsh literary and social culture.”
(Barbara Hardy, author of Dylan Thomas: An Original Language)
About the Author Walford Davies is a leading authority on Dylan Thomas. He is the author or editor of numerous works on and by Thomas, including The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood . He lives in Aberystwyth, Wales.

motw/Dylan Thomas - Walford Davies.pdf

Writers of Wales : Dylan Thomas (2nd Edition)

Layout 1

Adobe Acrobat 6.0

Walford Davies

GPC Books

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Cardiff, 1990

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 6.0 for Macintosh

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Cover 1
Back Cover 208
Acknowledgements 6
List of Illustrations 10
Preface 12
1 ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory 16
2 ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia 20
3 ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work 25
4 ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose 69
5 ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change 79
6 ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems 89
7 ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’ 102
8 ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war 108
9 ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts 113
10 ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies 125
11 ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’,‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond 133
12 ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood 148
13 ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet 165
14 ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems 170
15 ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man 181
Notes 189
Select Bibliography 195
Index 200

Walford Davies. New Ed. Previous Ed.: Milton Keynes : Oxford University Press, 1986. Bibliography: P. 64-67.

2025-10-27