An appreciative commentary on the life, work, and personality of the spellbinding Welsh poet, searching through the tragically short life and the conflict-ridden personality for the bases of Thomas' craft.

Through an analysis of the artist figures in Thomas's early experimental prose, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Under Milk Wood, Mayer illustrates that he was continually exploring and re-evaluating his vocation, the nature of his chosen medium, and the world itself. Mayer links Thomas's prose works to his poetry through the blending of lyric and narrative strategies. As well, she examines Thomas's self-conscious concerns about his relationship to his modernist contemporaries. Mayer goes beyond the traditional New Critical approaches that dominate Thomas scholarship and uses contemporary critical theory to offer new insights into the complexity and ambiguity of a major twentieth-century writer.

An important reappraisal of the poetry of Dylan Thomas in terms of modern critical theory.

An accessible introduction to the life and work of the inventive Welsh poet. Dylan Thomas—author of some of the century’s greatest poetry, stories, and film scripts as well as one of the greatest radio features ever broadcast, Under Milk Wood—is often characterized as self-indulgent. This concise and up-to-date biography challenges this depiction with a fresh portrait of the artist as a consummate professional. John Goodby and Chris Wigginton locate the source of Thomas’s daring and inventive style in the poet’s Anglo-Welsh origins as well as his historical, cultural, and social contexts: the Great Depression and 1930s literary London, surrealism, World War II, and Cold War popular culture. The result is a revealing and fresh introduction to the life and work of this important Welsh writer.

A dazzling collection of prose from one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century.

The title picture of Percy Bysshe Shelley in combination with the words 'Wandering" and "defence" imply that "wandering" is another way of saying "poetry," an inference to be drawn from the words of great poets of Shelley's generation. In every age most probably poetry needs to be defended anew. In Shelley's day the threat sprang from a philosophical climate that saw virtue in lucid unambiguous prose alone. Today leading theorists deny any vital connection between words found in poetry and literary prose and what they ostensibly point to in the world around. As such critics cannot find anything in 'wandering' to support their arguments they tend to ignore it as far as possible but words such as 'wanderer' are so deeply entrenched in German and English poetry that "wandering" resolutely stays put.