Posted on 24 April 2014
Tying in with the centenary celebrations of his birth, the University of Wales Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new edition in the Writers of Wales series on Dylan Thomas.
Written by Professor Walford Davies, and published this month, this critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas’s writing, in both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet.
A leading authority on the poet, Professor Davies is the author of Dylan Thomas (Open University Press), co-editor with Ralph Maud of the definitive editions of Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood (Dent), and editor of Selected Poems and Under Milk Wood for Penguin.
This publication explores the reciprocal relationship between 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. It answers the questions: Against what domestic, cultural, national and international background did Dylan Thomas emerge? How, given his short life, did he so quickly develop to be such a major world figure? What are the prime achievements of his writing in both prose and poetry?
The study also 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.
With 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’.
Dylan Thomas by Walford Davies (University of Wales Press, April 2014)
Series: Writers of Wales
£16.99 • HB • 9781783160587 • 216x138 mm • 208pp
Black and white images