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Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems: Chronology of Composition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

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

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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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