Books

This is a signed and jacketed first edition, second printing, of the second published collection by the poet Dylan MarlaisThomas (1914 1953). The author signed this copy "Dylan Thomas" in black ink on the upper half-title page just below his printed name.This second printing was issued in 1936, the same year as the first. Condition is very good plus in a very good dust jacket. The fragile, gray paper-covered binding is clean and tight. Trivial wear is confined to the spine ends and corners and there is a slight forward lean. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original upper front flap price. Minor loss is confined to the spine ends not affecting the spine print and flap fold corners, the spine mildly scuffed and toned. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover. In 1931, at the age of sixteen, Thomas left school in his native Swansea to work for a local evening newspaper. "Thomas'sprivate life as a poet was already underway. As he wrote each poem he copied it, with the date, into a student's exercise book, an orderliness that contrasted sharply with his louche exterior. Eventually there were four such notebooks, running from 1930 to 1934, containing more than 200 poems. After his brief career as a journalist ended early in 1933 he continued to live at home, ostensibly unemployed, filling the notebooks faster than ever. Half the ninety published poems by which he is known were written, in one form or another, during these early years." (ODNB)1934 s Eighteen Poems was Thomas s first published collection. This was followed in 1936 by Twenty-Five Poems. A laudatory review by Dame Edithin theSunday Times the same review quoted on the upper front flap of this dust jacket bolstered commercial success. The review proclaimed: "The work of this very young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally. � I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement." Because Thomas was digging deep into the notebooks, many of the poems published in the second volume had been written before those published in the first. Thomas s "�was very personal poetry, indifferent to the social and political concerns of the day. He was painfully aware of sex, time, decay, and death; he also had a powerful sense of his vocation as a poet, easily caricatured by detractors later on�it isThomas'srhetoric and romanticism that appeal so widely to the non-specialist reader, and his more accessible poems are widely anthologized." After the publication ofCollected Poems, 1934 1952, just after his thirty-eighth birthday, "Philip Toynbeethought him 'the greatest living poet in the English language' (Observer, 11 Nov 1952). The collection won the Foyle's poetry prize." (ODNB) The following year, a combination of despair, self-destruction, alcohol, and morphine ended Thomas s life, at age 39.

Twenty-Five Poems is a 1936 poetry collection by Dylan Thomas, his second published volume of poetry.