The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas

About this book

Dylan Thomass letters bring the poet and his times to life in a way that almost no biography can. First published by J. M. Dent in 1985 Thomass Collected Letters received exceptional reviews both for the scholarship of the editor and for the quality of the collection. This new edition will bring the letters back into print at a time when interest is renewed in the life of this exceptional writer. The letters begin in the poets schooldays and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between he loved wrote drank begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers work and the letters are full of his thoughts on his own work and on his friends as well as unguarded and certainly unpolitical comments on the work of his contemporaries - T.S. Eliot W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender among others. (Spender should be kicked...Day-Lewis hissed in public and have his balls beaten with a toffee hammer) More than a hundred new letters have been added since Paul Ferris edited the first edition of the Collected Letters in 1985. They cast Thomass adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. Thomass letters tell a remarkable story each letter taking the reader a little further along the path of the poets self-destruction but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the readers sympathies never quite abandon him.