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The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall

Some of the arguments about Thomas’s post-1970 marginalization in English and Welsh poetry criticism in the Introduction appeared in the Introduction to the Dylan Thomas New Casebook (2001), entered in the 2001-07 RAE. Some of the discussion of ‘Cold War pastoral’ in Chapter 6, relating to ‘Over Sir John’s hill’, ‘In Country Sleep’ and Under Milk Wood, is a much-rewritten version of material in my own chapter in the New Casebook, ‘“Very Profound and Very Box Office”: the Later Poems and Under Milk Wood’.

The study is extensive and complex; in preparation since 1998, it uses over 300 articles, essays and books, and covers the poetry’s critical reception, language use, biomorphism, Gothic-grotesque ‘surregionalism’, Anglo-Welsh- and English-ness, relationship to modernism and WWII culture, and status as Cold War pastoral. It is grounded in research on large quantities of far-flung primary materials (ms holdings in Austin, Buffalo, Aberystwyth and London) and deploys a wide range of theoretical approaches.