WHO was Dylan Thomas? The problem with answering that question is that as soon as he became known - and he had considerable fame in his day - he also became unknowable. For decades, legend and pretence were hopelessly mulched into any appraisal of his achievement. When he died in a New York hospital at the age of thirty nine, after drinking eighteen straight whiskies, by his own account, he was widely lamented as a great loss and a great talent.
He was both. He was also a ruthless invention of a flawed literary world. The last years of his life and probably the last energies of his gift were spent in public performance in the United States, where he presented his largely academic audiences with a dionysian vacation from the cool, Modernist initiative of its own poetry world.
This is not a large book. There are ninety or so poems. They were written between the years 1934 and 1953. They are uneven and the early work is hard to concentrate on. The phrase work remains compelling and the images can be wonderful. But Thomas was frequently an exhibitionist, ready to reach for the effect over the experience.
Whether or not the work is uneven, I cannot remember liking the arrangement of any poet's Collected Works - at least not for years as much as I do this. To start with, the book itself is handsome and solid, with a painting of the Gower peninsula on the front. Dent, of course, have been Thomas's publishers from the start. With the exception of Eighteen Poems in 1934, they published everything else although only after Thomas had a spirited correspondence with Richard Church, an editor there, about whether or not he was a surrealist caught in the throes of intellectual fashion.
The editors of this book, Ralph Maude and Walford Davies, provide only a terse preface at the start but expansive, interesting, almost festively informative notes at the back. They include letters, comments, scraps of information. In some cases, they reproduce illustrations of images which may have prompted Thomas, such as a photograph of the chalk figure cut in a Dorset hillside which may have prompted his poem "In the White Giant's Thigh". And all of this with clear page markings. It is a thoroughly friendly format and adds greatly to the study of the work. It also goes quite a way towards answering that first question, as to the identity of the poet.
Thomas, more than most, needs to be seen in context. Welsh by birth and spirit, he was nevertheless part of Bohemian London at a moment of change and reappraisal in British poetry. A sophisticated and fractured man, with a superstitious view of his own talent, he happened on the British poetic world just as it was beginning its anti Modernist, anti intellectual rerouting of poetry. It's not surprising, for instance, that Philip Larkin has a brief and affectionate recollection of meeting Thomas at an airport. They shared a suspicion of Modernism, a trust in lyricism, and both were pessimistic poets.
The best of the poems in this book show that the poet who charmed America, who wrote funny wartime letters about money and drunkenness and was larger than life, was nothing like this in his poetry: he was a cold, arcane perfectionist. What's more, in aesthetic terms, he had a strange and disabling split personality: he was musically thrifty but linguistically extravagant. Which leads to his single, most persistent and sometimes fatal flaw: the music of his poems frequently creates opportunities for emotional clarity and achieved experience which the language then proceeds, line by line, to diffuse and waste. He remained all his working life a wonderful poetic musician; he was not an especially good metrist, which is a different gift. But his music was his own. It was dark and authoritative, and in a poem such as "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London", it has a reach and grace which no poet of the day knew how to command.
Deep with the first dead lies Lon don's daughter.
Robed in the long friends
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother.
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
In a sense, Thomas got caught in his own trap. His facilities and gifts were so close to one another that he found it hard to break out of the first to bring some much needed discipline to the second. Many of these poems do not read well. They are too elaborate. They over extend imagery into confusion and pretension. Far too many are hard to pursue to the end. But Thomas's obstinate and risky poetic strategy was to make sound do the work of sense. Often it failed.
Nevertheless that dark, economical music remained at his disposal. And just occasionally, it met a restraint so formidable that it worked. When that happened, Thomas became the writer of some of the truly great poems in the language. Very few, it must be said, but those few are of an originality, power and beauty that have few equals. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is so frequently quoted that it is easy to lose sight of what it achieves. It is a masterful series of cadences slowed to a dirge at the very start by Thomas's careful use of monosyllables. Thomas wrote the poem for his father, who died, old and blind, in his eighties. In a letter to a friend - helpfully quoted in the notes here - he wrote: "My father is awfully ill these days with heart disease and uncharted pains and the world that was once the colour of tar to him is now a darker place." Out of these circumstances, and his own grief, comes what is certainly, together with Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art", the most commanding villanelle of the century:
Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
This volume will play a real part in drawing readers to Thomas who are on aware of his poems. And will give pleasure to those, like myself, who know them for a long time but are grateful to be told more about the processes and circumstances of their composition. Now that the ugly glamour of his death is a long way behind us, now that the posture of poetic enfant terrible is well and truly forgotten, he can be seen for what he was. And what he was, for all its flaws, is something many poets would settle for: a hard working, almost despairing craftsman who, on his best days, wrote some of the best poems of our time.