Annotated centenary edition of Dylan Thomas's collected poems

狄伦·托马斯是二十世纪最著名的诗人之一，他以非常难写的作家和非常平易近人的作家而闻名。他早期一些歌词中的阴郁艺术与电台名人、录音艺术家、电影编剧、《蕨山》和《牛奶树林下》的作者之间的反差，反映在他在普通读者中的受欢迎程度与他自20世纪70年代中期以来在学者和文学记者中相对较低的尊重之间的差距。后者认为他是一个过度的、不受控制的作家，是一个没有影响力的文学死胡同，与20世纪英国诗歌中最重要的潮流无关。然而，我自己进行了十多年的研究，得出的结论是，托马斯不仅不是一个新浪漫主义诗人，而且首先是一位受现代主义影响的诗人，他的修辞策略旨在制造激进的歧义，是英国诗歌中存在主义世界末日传统的奠基人，这一传统通过W·S·格雷厄姆、泰德·休斯和西尔维娅·普拉斯对当今产生了深远的、即使是隐藏的影响。主要问题是，20世纪50年代和60年代研究托马斯的主要批评家--威尼弗雷德·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--的详细工作并没有建立在1970年后。二十年来，托马斯在批判性学术领域的财富一直很活跃，但在1973年W·H·奥登去世后出现了转折点，英国兴起了一种保守的、以盎格鲁为中心的文化氛围(休·肯纳将其称为“沉没的岛屿综合症”)。20世纪30年代，作为对后帝国衰落的文化补偿，奥登确立了作为主要诗人的地位，这就要求奥登的替代品被边缘化，托马斯是其中最重要的。因此，塞缪尔·海因斯(Samuel Hynes)(1976)和瓦伦丁·坎宁安(Watine Cunningham)(1988)创作的20世纪30年代的标准历史实际上将托马斯排除在外，尽管他的诗歌有三分之二出现在1934年至1939年之间。他实际上被重新描述为一位只有20世纪40年代的诗人，他的声誉因后运动时期的教条而受损，人们认为这一时期是诗歌“可怕的十年”。同样，盎格鲁-威尔士文学研究中日益高涨的民族主义潮流意味着，托马斯虽然是正典的核心，但被视为异类，因为他的作品没有提供民族自我实现的寓言；他对固定身份的混合拒绝以及对作为英语作家的公然无罪，也没有在这方面起到帮助作用。其结果是，今天，即使是希望重新审视托马斯的诗歌的批评家也不确定它的真正意义，以及如何解释和放置它。新的百年诗集旨在帮助他们做到这一点，并使普通读者能够处理比选集主要内容更难，但同样美丽和深刻的诗歌。它将提供被遗忘的早期批评家的见解，但主要是利用我自己的研究，以一种揭示它们为当代观众提供的方式--它们如何创造性地驾驭语言的滑移，模糊性别和存在的边界，探索宗教冲动，颠覆固定的身份，以及绘制身体与意识和无意识之间的关系。其目的是在尊重其必要的不透明性的同时，对托马斯的工作的机智和大胆提供更全面、更细致入微和更直接的把握。通过以这些方式证实托马斯的重要性的主张，人们希望增加詹姆斯·基里、利奥·梅勒斯和安德鲁·邓肯等批评家目前对20世纪30年代和40年代诗歌的标准叙事的挑战，并卓有成效地对文学中威尔士人、盎格鲁-威尔士人和英国人的身份认同提出问题。

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.