Dylan Thomas

Here, in the masterpiece completed just before his death in 1953, Dylan Thomas gave fullest expression to his sense of the magnificent flavor and variety of life. A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coast town, Under Milk Wood begins with dreams and ghosts before dawn, moves through the brilliant, noisy day of the townspeople and closes as the “rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night.” As Randall Jarrell wrote: “It would be hard for any work of art to communicate more directly and funnily and lovingly what it is like to be alive.” Dylan Thomas called it “a play for voices,” and although it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation it had its first performances in New York, a series of try-outs in “concert” form, with Thomas directing and reading several parts. Enthusiastic audiences agreed with the critics, who called it “probably the richest and certainly the earthiest theatre experience of the season” (Saturday Review) and “a dazzling combination of poetic fireworks and music-hall humor” (N. Y. Times). When it was finally broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, The New Statesman and Nation wrote: “It is lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality: by comparison with anything broadcast for a long time, it exploded on the air like a bomb––but a life-giving bomb.”

This gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old for over half a century and is now a modern classic. Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child’s-eye view and an adult’s fond memories of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.

Under Milk Wood is the masterpiece “radio play for voices” Dylan Thomas finished just before his death in 1953. First commissioned by the BBC and broadcast in 1954, it has been performed and celebrated by Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Elton John, Tom Jones, Catherine Zeta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O’Toole, and many others. In Under Milk Wood, Thomas gave fullest expression to his sense of the magnificent flavor and variety of life. A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh town, the play begins with dreams and ghosts before dawn and closes “as the rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night.”

This new edition contains the definitive version of the play, edited by the noted Dylan Thomas scholars Walford Davies and Ralph Maud, with an in-depth introduction by Davies as well as extensive and helpful textual and explanatory notes.

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. The year of its publication, Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas’ body at the morgue of St. Vincent’s Hospital.) Since its initial publication in 1953, this book has become the definitive edition of the poet’s work. Thomas wrote “Prologue” addressed to “my readers, the strangers” – an introduction in verse that was the last poem he would ever write. Also included are classics such as “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” and “Fern Hill” that have influenced generations of artists from Bob Dylan (who changed his last name from Zimmerman in honor of the poet), to John Lennon (The Beatles included Thomas’ portrait on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band); this collection even appears in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road when it is retrieved from the rubble of a bookshelf.

The reputation of Dylan Thomas as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the six decades since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched.

This exciting, newly edited, annotated volume offers a more complete collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by the leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934–1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930–1934 notebooks and letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse script for “Our Country,” and the poems that appear in his radio “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby, whose notes and annotations take a full yet succinct approach.

One of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, Dylan Thomas prepared this collection of ninety poems shortly before his early death in 1953. These are the poems he felt best represented his work, and this collection honors the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. In addition to the textual corrections in this revised edition (originally published as The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas in 1953 by New Directions), a short chronology of the poet’s life and an index of titles’ and first lines have been added as well as the unfinished poem “In Country Heaven.”

Collected here are eight particularly enjoyable Dylan Thomas stories, stories hailed by The New Statesman as “the unself-conscious classics, compassionate, fresh, and very funny… radiating enthusiasm and delight in the telling.” The Los Angeles Times also praised the collection: “His prose, his images, his stories all pulsate with life, with a beat and variety that captivate, invigorate and clarify… What strikes one most, finally, about these stories is their generosity. With a little distance from thier alluring world, we’re aware of Dylan Thomas mining this material from inside his self, excavating, polishing, and setting it asparkle before us.”

A book full of surprises and delights, On the Air with Dylan Thomas presents all of Thomas’s BBC radio work (with the exception of “Under Milk Wood”, which is available separately). Thomas served his broadcasting apprenticeship as a teenager with his friend Daniel Jones. They set up a “station” between the second and first floors of the Jones’ home “Warmley,” dubbing it the Warmley Broadcasting Company. Then, starting in 1943 and continuing to his death, Thomas often sat behind a BBC microphone, variously giving radio talks, introducing poetry selections, participating in round-table discussions, reading dramas, essays, and poems. His was a glorious voice and he had a special case and inventiveness on the air.

This gathering of all Dylan Thomas’s stories—ranging chronologically from the dark, almost surrealistic tales of Thomas’s youth to such gloriously rumbustious celebrations of life as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and “Adventures in the Skin Trade”—charts the progress of “The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive” toward his mastery of the comic idiom. Here, too, are stories originally written for radio and television and, in a short appendix, the schoolboy pieces first published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine. A high point of the collection is Thomas’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,” a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.

Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety–somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, and irrepressible comedian of smalltown Wales.

Rebecca’s Daughters is the nearest Dylan Thomas ever came to realizing his ambition to write a film scenario in such a way that it would not only stand ready for shooting but would, at the same time, give the ordinary reader a visual impression of the film in words. A romantic adventure story set in mid-nineteenth-century Wales, Rebecca’s Daughters has a dashing hero who is not what he seems; commonfolk oppressed by the landowners; and finally, justice triumphant over greed and misused privilege. Who is the mysterious “Rebecca” swathed in wide black skirts with a shawl drawn over his mouth and his eyes flashing from beneath the brim of his tall black hat as he exhorts his “daughters” to tear down the hated tollgates imposed by the gentry’s Turnpike Trust? And where does the foppish Anthony Raine––just returned from a tour in India with the despised British army––stand? And how is the lovely Rhiannon to choose between them? This reissue of Thomas’s delightful tale of derring-do has been illustrated with charm and verve by the celebrated wood engraver and graphic artist Fritz Eichenberg.

Dylan Thomas’s principal works for film and radio provide a rewarding experience for those readers who know him only through his poetry and stories. The Doctor and the Devils is the scenario for a feature-length film. This tale of murder is based on the famous case of the Scottish body-snatchers Burke and Hare, who thrilled newspaper readers in the mid-nineteenth century and whose crimes are still relished among homicide buffs today. Giving full rein to the macabre, Thomas created characters and an atmosphere worthy of his best short stories. There are also other Thomas scripts: his unfinished screen adaptation of Maurice O’Sullivan’s autobiographical memoir Twenty Years A-Growing, with a synopsis of Thomas’s probable approach to its completion; a short radio play produced by the BBC in 1946 and directly related to the later Under Milk Wood, with an essay in which Ralph Maud traces the textual relationship; and a group of captions in verse for photographs in the British magazine Lilliput.

In England and America Dylan Thomas made his art and personality widely known through public readings, radio broadcasts and recordings. Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice. Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing––“A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” which has been called ’the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.

The “Young Dog” of the title is of course Thomas himself, and this volume of autobiographical stories by the great modern poet, who died at 39 while on his third lecture tour in the United States, shows his waggish humor at its best, his exuberance and verbal magic in spectacular display. It also shows him a spinner of tales and a creator of memorable characters. There is the grandfather who marches off in his best clothes to be buried in the next town, the sardonic “senior reporter” on a provincial newspaper, servant girls who know how to deal triumphantly with a fast-talking dandy, a twenty-year-old farmer preaching wildly to boys in a deserted barn, a group of respectable worthies who play at literature behind closed blinds, and always the observant and unfazed young Thomas. Few writers have evoked as successfully the mysteries and adventures of boyhood, of young love with its shattered dreams, or of death haunting two lads at play: none has done it in as fresh and telling phrases, with an elation as natural and contagious.

This collection of the poet Dylan Thomas’s fiction––and what an extraordinary storyteller he was!––holds special interest because it ranges from the early stories such as “The School for Witches” and “The Burning Baby,” with their powerful inheritance of Welsh mythology and wild imagination, to the chapters he completed before his death of the alas unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade. Adventures is the story, written in a shrewd, sly, deadpan vein of picaresque comedy, of young Samuel Bennet, who runs away from his home in Wales to seek his fortune in London. Sam soon finds himself involved––all the while with his finger stuck fast in an ale bottle––with a fantastic and whimsical assortment of odd characters whom only Dylan Thomas could have conceived.