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Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems: Chronology of Composition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Ralph N. Maud
Ralph N. Maud*
Affiliation:
University of Buffalo, New York
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Extract

There is a melancholy convenience in the fact that Dylan Thomas prepared his Collected Poems in the year before his death. The volume, like a last will and testament, contains all the poems that he wished to leave to the world. It is, in fact, a compilation of all five of his previously published volumes reproduced in sequence with very little alteration. Scholars and critics thus have an apparently settled corpus by which to judge Thomas' development in style and subject matter. Unfortunately the defin-itiveness of the Collected Poems, as far as chronology is concerned, is more apparent than real. The evidence given in this article shows that the order in which Thomas wrote his poems is quite different from the order in which they were published; so that statements about his development based on the sequence of the Collected Poems have had only limited validity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , June 1961 , pp. 292 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 292 See “Note” dated November 1952 in Collected Poems 1934–1952 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1952) and undated in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1953). The two editions (abbreviated CP) differ in pagination but not in text.

Note 2 in page 292 The Ave volumes are: 18 Poems (London: The Sunday Referee and the Parton Bookshop, 1934), Twenty-five Poems (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1936), The Map of Love (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1939), Deatlts and Entrances (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946), In Country Sleep (New York: New Directions, 1952). These titles are abbreviated 18P, 25 Poems or 25P, ML, DE, and ICS, respectively. Paper and Sticks (in DE) was dropped while the Collected Poems was in proof. Once below a time, not previously included in a volume, was added; as was Author's Prologue.

Note 3 in page 292 Elder Olson, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 151, distinguishes three periods: (1) 18 Poems and 25 Poems, (2) The Map of Love and Deaths and Entrances, with exceptions that initiate the final period, (3) In Country Sleep. “If the three periods in his work are distinct in their subject matter, they are even more sharply distinct in their diction and prosody” (p. 20). Such a general statement is valuable; but, in particularizing, the critic must inevitably run into trouble. For instance, Olson characterizes Out of the sighs as having “the shape and stamp of a despair as deep as falls on Macbeth after the death of his wife…” and “the very essence of passion and feeling such as only a towering character could support” (p. 25); one would hesitate to make so much of the poem knowing it to be written, four years prior to publication, by a boy of seventeen.

Note 4 in page 292 The titles of the four notebooks, as designated by Lock-wood Library of the University of Buffalo, are given in the chronological list, along with some indication of the extent of the contents. Typescripts in the British Museum confirmed some points and; in the case of Especially when the October wind, filled a striking gap in the list. Documents in the Harvard College Library and in the possession of T. E. Hanley were also useful.

Note 5 in page 292 Edited with an Introduction by Vernon Watkins (London: J. M. Dent & Sons and Faber & Faber, 1957). Abbreviated LVW.

Note 6 in page 293 Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949), ch. vii, passim; 2nd. ed. (London: Ernest Benn; New York: de Graff, 1956), ch. viii, passim. Derek Stanford, Dylan Thomas (London: Neville Spearman, 1954), pp. 64 and 73. W. S. Merwin, “A Religious Poet,” Adam (1953), p. 75. C.B.S., “Dylan Thomas,” New Verse (Xmas 1936), pp. 1920; this reviewer of Twenty-five Poems on its first appearance picked out the following poems from the volume, calling them “sense” poems as opposed to the rest, “nonsense” poems: This bread I break, Shall gods be said to thump the clouds, Here in this spring, Out of the sighs, Why east wind chills, Ears in the turrets hear, The hand that signed the paper, Should lanterns shine, and / have longed to move away. All nine we discover to be early, revised poems.

Note 7 in page 294 The list is arranged so that the date of composition precedes the title and that of revision, where applicable, follows it. For the notebook poems, Thomas' own date and numbering notation are given. Brackets [] indicate reasonable conjecture. LVW indicates that the authority is the poet's Letters to Vernon Watkins. The right-hand columns of the list give publication facts: (1) first publication, the number in brackets before the title giving chronological order; (2) the volume (title in abbreviated form) in which the particular poem was first collected. Two publication dates are taken unchecked from J. Alexander Rolph, Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: New Directions, 1956), which has been valuable in many other ways.

Note 8 in page 296 This is an item to add to the Rolph bibliography. See Ralph N. Maud, “Dylan Thomas' First Published Poem,” MLN, lxxiv (February 1959), 117–118.

Note 9 in page 297 However, Thomas is completely open about the fact in one of the letters in the unpublished Treece correspondence at the Lockwood Library of the University of Buffalo.