Annotated centenary edition of Dylan Thomas's collected poems

迪伦托马斯是二十世纪最著名的诗人之一，作为一个非常困难的作家和一个非常容易接近的一个独特的声誉。一方面，他早期的一些歌词的“阴郁艺术”与另一方面，广播名人，录音艺术家，电影编剧和《蕨山》和《牛奶林下》的作者之间的对比，反映在他在一般阅读公众中的受欢迎程度与他自20世纪70年代中期以来在学术界和文学记者中享有的相对较低的尊重之间的差异。后者认为他是一个“过度”，不受控制的作家，一个没有影响力的文学死胡同，与二十世纪英国诗歌的最重要潮流无关。然而，我自己十多年的研究使我得出结论，托马斯远不是一个新浪漫主义者，他首先是一个受现代主义影响的诗人，他的修辞策略旨在产生激进的模糊性，他是英国诗歌中存在主义-启示录传统的创始人，通过W. S.格雷厄姆，特德休斯和西尔维亚普拉斯。主要的问题是，在20世纪50年代和60年代，主要的评论家们对托马斯的详细研究--威妮弗雷德·诺沃特尼、威廉·T.莫伊尼汉、威廉·恩普森、J·希利斯米勒和约翰·贝利--在1970年后就没有建立起来了。托马斯在学术批评方面的命运在二十年来一直很好，转折点出现在W。H.奥登于1973年去世，保守的、以英国为中心的文化氛围在英格兰兴起（休·肯纳称之为“下沉岛屿综合症”）。为了对后帝国时代的衰落进行文化补偿，奥登被称为“主要”诗人，20世纪30年代被称为“奥登时代”，这要求奥登的替代者靠边站，其中托马斯是最重要的。因此，塞缪尔·海因斯（Samuel Hynes，1976）和瓦伦丁·坎宁安（Valentine Cunningham，1988）所著的20世纪30年代写作的标准历史几乎将托马斯排除在外，尽管他三分之二的诗歌出现在1934年至1939年之间。实际上，他被重新描述为20世纪40年代唯一的诗人，他的声誉受到后运动教条的影响，这一时期是诗歌的“可怕的十年”。同样，盎格鲁-威尔士文学研究中日益增长的民族主义潮流意味着，托马斯虽然是正典的核心，但却被视为与正典格格不入，因为他的作品没有提供民族自我实现的寓言;他对固定身份的拒绝和对作为一名英语作家的公然缺乏内疚感的混合体在这方面也没有帮助。结果是，今天即使是希望重新审视托马斯诗歌的评论家也不确定它的真正意义，以及如何解释和放置它。新的百年版诗歌旨在帮助他们做到这一点，并使普通读者能够处理比选集斯台普斯更难的诗歌，但同样美丽和深刻。它将提供早期批评家被遗忘的见解，但主要是利用我自己的研究，以揭示它们为当代观众提供的方式呈现这些诗歌-它们如何创造性地驾驭语言的滑动，模糊性别和存在的界限，探索宗教冲动，颠覆固定的身份，并绘制身体与意识和无意识心灵之间的关系。其目的是提供一个更全面，更细致入微和直接掌握的机智和大胆的托马斯的工作，同时尊重其必要的不透明性。通过证实托马斯在这些方面的重要性的要求，它希望增加目前正在由批评家，如詹姆斯·基利，利奥·梅勒斯和安德鲁邓肯的标准叙事约20世纪30年代和40年代的诗歌，并富有成效地problematise威尔士，盎格鲁-威尔士和英国身份的文学性质的挑战。

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.