Annotated centenary edition of Dylan Thomas's collected poems

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Dylan Thomas is one of the best-known of twentieth century poets, with a unique reputation as both a very difficult writer and as an immensely accessible one. The contrast between the 'sullen art' of some of his early lyrics on the one hand, and the radio personality, recording artist, film scriptwriter, and author of 'Fern Hill' and Under Milk Wood on the other, is reflected in the disparity between his popularity with the general reading public and the relatively low esteem he has enjoyed among academics and literary journalists since the mid-1970s. By the latter he is regarded as an 'excessive', uncontrolled writer, a literary dead-end who had no influence, and as irrelevant to the most important currents in twentieth century British poetry. However my own research, conducted over more than a decade, has led me to conclude that, far from being a neo-Romantic Thomas is first and foremost a modernist-influenced poet whose rhetorical strategies are aimed at producing radical ambiguity, the founder of a strain of an existential-apocalyptic tradition in British poetry which has had a profound, if hidden influence on the present via W. S. Graham, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The chief problem is that the detailed work of leading critics working on Thomas in the 1950s and 1960s - Winifred Nowottny, William T. Moynihan, William Empson, J. Hillis Miller, and John Bayley - was not built on after 1970. The turning-point in Thomas's critical-academic fortunes, which had been buoyant for two decades, came after W. H. Auden's death in 1973, and the rise of a conservative, anglocentric cultural climate in England (what Hugh Kenner called the 'sinking island syndrome'). Asserting Auden's status as a 'major' poet by way of cultural compensation for post-imperial decline, the 1930s were configured as 'the Age of Auden', and this required the sidelining of alternatives to Auden, of whom Thomas was the most significant. Thus, the standard histories of 1930s writing, by Samuel Hynes (1976) and Valentine Cunningham (1988), virtually exclude Thomas, even though two-thirds of his poetry appeared between 1934 and 1939. Effectively redescribed as a 1940s-only poet, his reputation suffered from the post-Movement dogma that this period was a 'dire decade' for poetry. Equally, a growing nationalist current in Anglo-Welsh literary studies meant that Thomas, while central to the canon, was perceived as anomalous to it because his work did not offer allegories of national self-realisation; nor did his hybrid refusal of fixed identity and blatant lack of guilt at being an anglophone writer, help in this respect. The result is that today even critics wishing to re-examine Thomas's poetry are unsure about its true significance, and how to interpret and place it. The new centenary edition of the poems is aimed at helping them do that, and at enabling the general reader to tackle poems which are tougher than the anthology staples, but equally beautiful and profound. It will make available the forgotten insights of earlier critics, but chiefly it will draw on my own research to present the poems in a way which reveals what they offer a contemporary audience - how they inventively ride the slippages of language, blur gender and existential boundaries, explore the religious impulse, subvert fixed identities, and map the relationship between the body and the conscious and unconscious mind. The aim is to offer a fuller, more nuanced and immediate grasp of the wit and daring of Thomas' work while respecting its necessary opacity. By substantiating the claim for Thomas's importance in these ways it is hoped to add to the challenge currently being made by critics such as James Keery, Leo Mellors and Andrew Duncan to the standard narratives about 1930s and 1940s poetry, and to fruitfully problematise the nature of Welsh, Anglo-Welsh, and British identities in literature.