Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays (20th Century Views) [Paperback]

C.B. Cox (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Prentice-Hall (May 1966)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0139193731
• ISBN-13: 978-0139193736
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,175,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars " And Death shall have no Dominion", April 21, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Dylan Thomas; a Collection of Critical Essays (Hardcover)

This collection of critical essays edited by C.B. Cox is an especially fine one. It includes essays by John Wain, David Daiches, John Ackerman, Elder Olson, Winifed Nowottny, Ralph Maud, William Empson, Raymond Williams, David Holbrook, Annis Pratt, Robert M.Adams , John Bayley, Karl Shapiro.

I found especially interesting "The Welsh Background" by John Ackerman. He speaks of the way Thomas who did not know Welsh shared much with his Welsh contemporaries , above all, Vernon Watkins. He speaks of the Romantic element in Thomas, the introspective, the wildly original. Thomas burst upon the scene in the thirties a voice very much different from the prevailing Eliot- Yeats- Auden spirit of the time.

In a sense the most moving essay is the one by Karl Shapiro written shortly after Thomas' death at the age of thirty- nine. Fellow poet Shapiro knows the canon of Thomas poetry and selects thirty of the poems as those he believes will truly stand the test of time (Thomas wrote "I advance for as long as forever is ")

The poems Shapiro selects are"

" I see the boys of summer", " A process in the weather of the heart","The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", "Especially when the October wind"," When, like a running grave", "Light breaks where no sun shines", "Do you not father me", " A grief ago", "And death shall have no dominion", "Then was my neophyte", "When all my five and country senses see"" We lying by seas and sand" "It is the sinners' dust- tongued bell"," After the funeral", "Not from this anger", "How shall my animal", "Twenty- four years", " A refusal to mourn", "Poem in October", "The Hunchback in the Park"" Into her lying down head" " Do not go gentle" " A Winter's Tale" " On the Marriage of a Virgin" " When I woke" "Among those killed in the dawn raid" "Fern Hill" "In country sleep", "Over the John's Hill" "Poem on his Birthday".

Shapiro discusses Thomas' major themes, of his moving " between sexual revulsion and sexual ecstasy, between puritanism and mysticism, between formalistic ritual ( this accounts for his lack of invention) and vagueness." Wain writes of " the note of doom in the midst of present pleasure, for concealed in each moment lie change and death." He discusses the difference between the obscure early poems and those of the more mature later poems. Wain speaks of a progress from a period in which "techniques of identification pressed too far through a period of occasional verse.. to a period of more limpid , open- worked poetry in which instead of endeavouring to leap outside time into a pantheistic cosmos beyond the dimensions, he accepts time and change and uses memory as an elegaic device".

This book throws light on a wide variety of aspects of the bard whose voice and presence powerfully moved his listeners and readers.

There is a Jewish teaching "that the evil are dead in their lives, while the righteous live after their death" Perhaps of Thomas it can be said as a poet" After the first life there truly is another"