Dylan Thomas: A New Life FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas -- author of "Under Milkwood, A Child's Christmas In Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and numerous poems and stories -- Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around this extraordinarily talented writer, one of the most celebrated and contradictory literary figures of the twentieth century.
When Dylan Thomas died, in New York in 1953, he was only thirty-nine years old and the myths soon took hold. He became the Keats and the Byron of his generation -- the romantic poet who died too young, his potential unfulfilled. Making masterful use of original material from archives and personal papers, Lycett describes the development of the young poet and brings invaluable new insights to Thomas's early writing and the themes that continued to appear in all he wrote. This major new work unearths fascinating details about the poet's many affairs and about his tempestuous marriage to his passionate Irish wife, Caitlin.
Lycett uses as his overwhelming motif the deeply ambivalent forces in Thomas's life -- "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me" -- that allowed him to be a wild boy in public and a private poet of deep sensitivity -- the forces that helped him bridge the gap between modernism and pop, between the written and spoken word, between individual and performance art, between the academy and the forum. Throughout, the social and historical context of Thomas's struggles and accomplishments are vividly presented.
The result is a poignant yet stirring portrait of the chaos of Thomas's personal life and a welcome re-evaluation of the lyricism and experimentalism of his poetry, plays, and short stories.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Welsh poet's death at age 39 in New York, London Times contributor Lycett's new biography has the advantage that Thomas's protective widow, Caitlin, is also recently deceased and his literary estate open. The basic story of the self-styled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," told here with thoroughness and impartiality, still revolves around poetry, penury and pub crawling. Leaving Swansea after grammar school (though returning whenever cash ran short), Thomas spent several aimless years on the periphery of London literary circles before finally making good and eventually becoming a cult figure for American audiences. This public poetic persona ultimately detracted from his poetry more than the assorted side projects in radio, film and lecturing he took on for income. Half a century after Thomas's death, Lycett can be frank about the seamier side of the poet's character, such as his inclination for reading what he called "good fucking books" like Tropic of Cancer, possible drug use and his and Caitlin's extramarital affairs. Thomas's literary reputation, meanwhile, has fluctuated more than his steady popularity, from A Child's Christmas in Wales to "Do not go gentle into that good night." Lycett, who has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming among others, says Dylan fills "the gap between modernism and pop... the written and spoken word... individual and performance art..." and he admires Thomas's lyric gift as an English poet with roots in Wales. Despite its subtitle, Lycett's biography is not so much a new life as a more candid revisiting of the familiar one. 45 b&w photos. (June 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Dylan Thomas wrote his first book of poetry by the time he was 20, and within a few years he was renowned in the U.K. not only as a well-paid and celebrated writer but also as a drunkard and a scrounger. After gaining fame for his BBC radio play, Under Milk Wood, Thomas was invited on a tour of the United States, where he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 39. Lycett, biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming, has written a life study of Thomas that incorporates previously unavailable material released after the deaths of the poet's wife and son. Other biographies, such as Constant Fitzgibbons's lasting Life of Dylan Thomas or Paul Ferris's Dylan Thomas: The Biography, have ably recounted the essential details of Thomas's life, but Lycett here provides a wealth of useful detail, bringing the Welsh poet's life story up to date, just in time for and in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death. For all libraries.-Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The British biographer of Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling memorializes the chaotic and abbreviated existence of the 20th century's most Romantic poet. Born in 1914, in Swansea, Wales, to a socially ambitious schoolmaster and a voluble former seamstress, the precocious Dylan Thomas began writing sophisticated English poetry at the age of 10 or 12. In his teens, on summer visits to his mother's Welsh-speaking relatives at Fernhill, the family farm for which one of his best-loved poems was named, he discovered rural Welsh traditions and began to mix English forms with Welsh images and rhythms, for which he later became famous. He also began to drink, and the drinking never slackened. At 22, after publishing his first book (18 Poems), he wed Caitlin Macnamara, the beautiful, wild, hard-drinking young mistress of painter Augustus John; and so began one of the era's stormiest, most violent literary marriages. For the rest of Thomas's short life, until his death from alcohol poisoning in Greenwich Village in 1953, he and Caitlin traveled, drank, fought, cadged money, cheated on each other publicly and obsessively, and made increasingly squalid scenes on three continents. That Thomas also created a body of masterful, if sometimes opaque, lyrical poetry and performed it beautifully on stage and radio explains his extraordinary and lasting popular notoriety. His best-known work, Under Milk Wood, not quite complete when he died, extended his life's drama for a little while, as friends, handlers, and Caitlin all stormed his New York hotel room, vying for possession of the poet's last, great work. Scrupulously researched but overly detailed.
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