Walford Davies – författare

Praised for his verbal inventiveness, image-making power and almost pagan metaphysics, Dylan Thomas's poems are visions of creation and morality.

This is a short critical study analysing the achievement of Dylan Thomas against its Welsh cultural background, and at the same time giving an overview of his career and impact as one of the most original and attractive of twentieth-century poets internationally. The book was originally published in a limited edition in the Writers of Wales series and has now been revised.

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.