Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Summary - eNotes.com Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Summary link Link Posthumous biographical studies of Dylan Thomas record a change in appreciation that was long overdue. During his lifetime, Thomas was regarded in the United States as a great English poet and reciter, but only after his death did his work—which includes poetry, fiction, dramas, essays, and impressionistic sketches—come to be regarded as a multifaceted whole. Representative of this reassessment was the growing respect accorded his first collection of short stories, which is also a mock-autobiography, that Thomas titled in imitation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). If his critics are right in concluding that most of Thomas’s best poetry was written in Swansea before he left Wales for London at the age of twenty, it may also be suggested that this collection of short stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, set in Swansea and environs, laid the foundations for much of the work that was to follow.

“One Warm Saturday,” the final story in the collection, seems to anticipate the events of Thomas’s next book of prose, the unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955), which uses the same surrealistic style. In both the story and the novel, the ever-pursued eludes capture by the hero as reality dissolves around him. In fact, this may well be the underlying theme of the entire collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. The relationship of these stories to the Thomas canon, however, is not entirely straightforward. Adventures in the Skin Trade was the first prose work; Thomas called it his “Welsh book.” It was commissioned by a London publisher, and the first chapter appeared in the periodical Wales in 1937. The previous year, Richard Church had suggested that Thomas write some autobiographical prose tales. After his marriage in July, 1937, Thomas took up this project but set to work in a very different style. He first produced “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” in which the surrealism is muted and the lyrical tone sustained by the young narrator; this story, standing second in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, became Thomas’s favorite broadcast and reading material.

The most interesting feature of the new style of story is the rapid succession of apparently logical but often haphazardly related events, the whole ending in a diminuendo that seems anticlimactic. The intention of the play of events on the diminutive observer is to record, by means of an episode that largely concerns or happens to others, a stage in the observer’s growth, that is, in his development as a “young dog.” The development of the Thomas found in the collection into the “young dog” of the final tales is related to the development of the real Thomas as a writer. This is seen principally in his use of autobiographical material for prose, poetry, and drama. Thomas delivered the typescript of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to his publisher, in lieu of the “Welsh book,” in December, 1939. Nine days later, talking to Richard Hughes, he remarked that the people of Laugharne, where he was then living, needed a play of their own. This remark is usually recognized as the origin of Under Milk Wood, which was first broadcast as a radio drama in 1954.

Some years earlier, Thomas had toyed with the notion of doing another imitation of Joyce, a sort of Welsh Ulysses that would cover twenty-four hours in the life of a Welsh village. The notion of imitating Joyce and the suggestions of Church and Hughes coalesced with his development of a distinct prose style (instead of a prose extension of his verse, as in Adventures in the Skin Trade) and resulted in his best-known prose and drama. The autobiographical base is common to both works and to his poetry. Fern Hill and Ann Jones stood as models to Gorsehill and Auntie Ann of the first story, “The Peaches,” and also to the poems “Fern Hill”... (The entire section is 1623 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers.

On the Go Access Dylan Thomas - Collected Stories - DylanThomas.com Dylan Thomas – Collected Stories Dylan Thomas – Collected Stories, edited by Walford Davies, introduced by Leslie Norris (London: Phoenix, 2000) Dylan wrote short stories from a young age. Many were published in periodicals and others broadcast on the radio. Some of his early, more surreal stories (which show the influence of Caradoc Evans’ infamous collection of short stories My People) were published in The Map of Love in 1939. His best known volume, the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, was issued in 1940. The Collected Stories gather these together with fragments of Dylan’s unfinished novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, and other pieces, including A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Return Journey. After the Fair The End of the River The Lemon The Mouse and the Woman A Prospect of the Sea The Holy Six In the Direction of the Beginning An Adventure from a Work in Progress Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog The Peaches A Visit to Grandpa’s Patricia, Edith and Arnold Who Do You Wish Was With Us?

Old Garbo Adventures in the Skin Trade A Fine Beginning A Child’s Christmas in Wales Holiday Memory The Crumbs of One Man’s Year Return Journey A Story (also known as The Outing) Appendix: Early Stories James Joyce (and Stephen Dedalus) | Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle ¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 In 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War, Ezra Pound facilitated the publishing of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the modernist journal The Egoist. The novel appeared in serial form in that journal throughout the years 1914-15, and the scene in which Stephen Dedalus awakes at dawn and composes a villanelle was published as a single installment in the July 1, 1915 issue. The installment begins with the sentence “The rain fell faster,” just after Stephen has finishing expounding his aesthetic philosophy to Lynch, and just before Stephen encounters his “beloved,” E. C., near the library.

It ends with the full text of the villanelle: Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of enchanted days. Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze And you have had your will of him. Are you not weary of ardent ways? Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim. Tell no more of enchanted days. Our broken cries and mournful lays Rise in one eucharistic hymn. Are you not weary of ardent ways? The chalice flowing to the brim, Tell no more of enchanted days. And still you hold our longing gaze With languorous look and lavish limb! Are you not weary of ardent ways? Tell no more of enchanted days. (Portrait, Anderson, 223-4) ¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 In the original issue of The Egoist and in published versions of the novel, the full text of the villanelle is followed with a row of asterisks, indicating with more emphasis than usual for Joyce that the villanelle marks the end of a discrete episode.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Hans Walter Gabler, on manuscript evidence, suggests that the villanelle scene was belatedly added to a fair copy of Portrait in 1914. 1 According to Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, “Villanelle of the Temptress” was written much earlier, about 1900, while Joyce–then about eighteen–was in his last year at Belvedere college. 2 Joyce titled his first unpublished book of poems Moods, which Stanislaus found to be indicative of Joyce’s affection for the moodiness of “romantic piano music: Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Schubert” (65). His second unpublished collection was called Shine and Dark, after a plan that resembled Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: flagrantly simple lyrics with polarized perspectives. “Villanelle of the Temptress” was part of the Shine and Dark collection, and it too shows the emphasis of Joyce’s lyric poetry on mood.

In 1902 Joyce sent a poem (it is not known which one) to Yeats for comment, who, while encouraging, was also frank about the shortcomings of Joyce’s lyrical attempts: ¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 I think that the thought is a little thin. Perhaps I will make you angry when I say that it is the poetry of a young man, of a young man who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops. […] The work which you have actually done is very remarkable for a man of your age who has lived away from vital intellectual centres. Your technique in verse is much better than the technique of any young Dublin man I have met during my time. It might have been the work of a young man who had lived in an Oxford literary set. (qtd.

in My Brother’s Keeper 208-9) ¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 In the same year of 1902, probably as a result of this honest assessment from Yeats and a similarly unenthusiastic judgment from the renowned critic William Archer, Joyce destroyed most of his poems, saving only “Villanelle of the Temptress” and a few others. He began work at this time on the verses that appear in a volume titled Chamber Music (1907). ¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 The manuscript of Chamber Music was complete by September of 1904; at that time, Joyce was devoting serious effort to Stephen Hero, which would become Portrait. 3 In these years, Joyce was turning ever more resolutely away from poetry and toward prose.

Ellmann writes that Joyce, “quite independently” of his authoritative critics, was “uncertain about his verse”: ¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The principal source of uncertainty, as he acknowledged candidly to Stanislaus and to himself, was that he could not rival his countryman Yeats, whose volume of lyrics, The Wind Among the Reeds, had awakened his intense admiration when it appeared in 1899. About his prose, however, he had no such modesty, and he was already beginning to feel he might outdo George Moore, Hardy, and Tureen, if not Tolstoy. In prose he thought he might achieve more subtlety than in meter. (Ellmann 1959, 83) ¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Joyce seems to have transformed his uncertainty about his own verse to a negative judgment of verse in general as an artistic mode. Joyce’s Portrait is nothing if not the chronicle of a young man’s vocational anxieties: all Stephen’s religious, political, and sexual anxieties seem ultimately to be subsumed in the overwhelming question of his artistry.

The villanelle that Stephen writes is at the center of all these anxieties, and is one of the results of it. But while Stephen does find some solution to his difficulties by identifying himself as an artist in exile, the kind of art that Stephen produces in the course of Portrait, most notably the villanelle, proves inadequate to characterize and ameliorate those anxieties. The inadequacies of the villanelle as an artistic genre produce the desire for an art that will be less inadequate, and thus the mimetic experimental prose style of Portrait, Dubliners, and Ulysses comes to replace outdated forms like the villanelle, and indeed lyric more generally. ¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 The scene in which Stephen composes “Villanelle of the Temptress” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man immediately follows the central exposition of Stephen’s famous aesthetic philosophy: ¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 –Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another.

Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life.

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. ¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Stephen here proposes a tripartite categorical hierarchy of literary form: first and lowest is the lyric, second is the simple epic, third and highest is the dramatic. The theory he expounds assumes that a progression from the lowest forms to the highest forms is possible, and that continued growth as an artist will proceed along those lines. Although some critics have suggested that Portrait is itself the best exemplar of Stephen’s aesthetic philosophy, I would suggest that Joyce might well not consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to have achieved the third and highest level of dramatic form.

Portrait and its early rendering Stephen Hero seem to have more in common with its cognate Turpin Hero at the second rank, especially when compared to the later achievement of Ulysses. ¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 And if a seemingly authorless mimesis is the gold standard, all Joyce’s novels might be said to be inferior to staged drama. Joyce, who idolized Ibsen in his youth, never mastered the genre of the play: he wrote one called A Brilliant Career in 1900, just before he began to write Portrait, but destroyed it in 1902; he wrote another called Exiles in 1915, just after he finished Portrait, but it flopped badly when it was ultimately produced in Munich in 1919.

4 (The ideal artist Joyce describes resembles a safely ensconced theatrical prompter as much as he resembles an indifferent God.) Portrait, for all its undeniable advances in the direction of impersonal mimetic narration, is equally undeniably centered on the Joycean figure of Stephen, who certainly “prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event”; it is true that “the narrative is no longer purely personal” [emphasis added], but neither is it yet as purely impersonal as Joyce’s later works. Portrait has not yet “reached” the highest form, the “dramatic form,” but it has surpassed the lowest form, represented by Stephen’s “purely personal” lyric impulse. Portrait, precisely inverting the model of Turpin Hero, begins in the third person and ends in the first person–but we can imagine that at the end of Portrait Stephen launches himself toward an anticipated eventual return to his idyllic third-person origin, where all that exists is the story without any apparent narrator: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was . . .” (7). Moreover, Joyce seems to have shaped his own literary career to the trajectory that Stephen outlines.

As Richard Ellmann writes, “His work began in the merest lyric and ended in the vastest encyclopedia” (1982, 4). Stephen’s villanelle exemplifies the form of literature Stephen relegates to the lowest rank, the rank of literature attempted by neophytes: lyric. ¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 The choice to use the villanelle in Portrait as an exemplar of lesser art rather than another lyric was probably due to the efficiency of its semiotic labor. In other words, because the villanelle form had a low reputation in the period, a modernist audience would be able to recognize the immaturity of Stephen’s lyricism, and, of course, to compare it to the far greater sophistication and originality of Joyce’s prose. That Joyce’s contemporaries did indeed perform this kind of comparison is seen in Alice Corbin Henderson’s 1919 review of a new edition of Chamber Music in the modernist journal Poetry. Henderson agreed with the unenthusiastic judgments of Yeats, Archer, and Joyce himself about the inadequacy and outdatedness of Joyce’s early verse.

The term “thin” recurred: ¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Mr. James Joyce is better known as a novelist and playwright than as a poet, and deservedly so. For after everything has been said that could possibly be said in favor of his poems–after one has noted their musical phrasing, their verbal felicity, their delicate charm–the fact is that the general tone is rather pale and anaemic and the music thin. The music indeed has been compared to that of the Elizabethan song books, but this is hardly fair to Mr. Joyce; and the spirit of the poems is much closer to the 1890’s than to the Elizabethan mood, which is very much fuller and richer in every way. (98-9) ¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Henderson’s point that “the spirit of the poems is much closer to the 1890’s than to the Elizabethan mood” applies also or even more so to “Villanelle of the Temptress,” whose form as well as spirit derived from that era.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Contemporary Joyce scholars commenting on Portrait have debated the merits of Stephen’s villanelle in the course of discussing the degree of aesthetic distance between Joyce and Stephen in the scene of the villanelle’s composition; most, though not all, have agreed that whatever our own reactions to the poem may be, Joyce does not endorse it as an example of good art. 5 Knowledge of the general reputation of the villanelle in the period lends weight to the proposition that Stephen’s villanelle is treated ironically, even satirically, and that by the time Joyce included it in the manuscript of Portrait circa 1914 he felt a considerable distance from it. The modernist readers of The Egoist, with the works of the post-Romantics still in their memories, would almost surely have perceived the villanelle as a trite, outdated form.

As Robert Adams Day writes, ¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 [T]hough Stephen is not quite so arrogant as to say to himself, “I think I’ll write a villanelle this morning,” he virtually says so, and this fact shows that he is thinking in clichés, for the villanelle, though an ancient and beautiful French form, had had a great vogue among the precious poetasters of the naughty nineties in England, and by the time A Portrait appeared had already become as wearily conventional and thoroughly exhausted as the Petrarchan sonnet had become by the death of Queen Elizabeth. (77-8) ¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 The function of the villanelle in Portrait, then, is to show that, as Robert Adams Day puts it, “Stephen the youthful poet systematically violates every rule and requirement of Stephen the precocious critic” (81). Stephen’s villanelle is not meant to be taken seriously; Stephen’s aesthetic principles are. Most serious of all is Joyce’s prose technique, which differs so radically from Stephen’s villanelle.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 The prominent role “Villanelle of the Temptress” plays in Portrait was probably a significant factor in the survival of the villanelle in a twentieth-century poetic crucible that contained no more than a few disregarded examples. Dylan Thomas, in particular, almost certainly encountered the villanelle form in Joyce’s Portrait, though it is unlikely that his “Do not go gentle into that good night” was influenced either positively or negatively by the actual execution of “Villanelle of the Temptress.” Thomas published a collection of autobiographical short stories titled Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog in 1940, and while he denied that the title derived from Joyce, he did admit that he had read Joyce’s early work and might have been influenced by the prose style of Dubliners. 6 The publicity that Joyce’s Portrait gave to the villanelle form probably constitutes the entirety of the effect “Villanelle of the Temptress” has had upon poets–but this is not insignificant, given the immensity of Joyce’s reputation and the difficulty of judging the author’s attitude toward the villanelle in Portrait.

That Joyce included “Villanelle of the Temptress” in Portrait, even as an example of immature art, is highly likely to have contributed to the reputation of the villanelle as a legitimate genre. ¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 See Hans Walter Gabler’s introduction to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche (New York: Garland, 1993) 4-5 and Hans Walter Gabler, “The Seven Lost Years of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Approaches to Joyce’s Portrait: Ten Essays, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock ([Pittsburgh]: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976). Gabler writes, “A manuscript section in chapter V clearly set off as an insert from its surroundings is the villanelle movement. Its sixteen manuscript pages are (but for the last one) inscribed with a different ink and a different slope of the hand on different paper” (“Seven” 44).

Other evidence Gabler examines proves to his satisfaction that this section was transcribed and inserted after the rest of Chapter V had been completed; the manuscript is dated 1913, but parts of it, including the beginning of Chapter V, probably date from 1911. Gabler admits that the evidence of the villanelle movement’s later insertion does not necessarily mean that it had been written later: “On the contrary, considering the marks of wear and tear on [the last page of the villanelle movement, which includes two lines of prose and the full text of the villanelle], it is not even out of the question that the villanelle section in an earlier unrevised state also belonged to the pages of the rescued 1911 manuscript” (“Seven” 45). In other words, the evidence that the villanelle scene was written in 1914 is inconclusive, but it probably does not predate 1911.

“Villanelle of the Temptress” is mentioned by name in the manuscript of Stephen Hero, which dates from 1904-1906, but the full text of the villanelle is not given, nor is the scene of its composition described. ↩ Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years, 1st McGraw-Hill paperback edn. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 85-6. See also Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) 86. The passage in which Ellmann cites Stanislaus Joyce regarding the date of “Villanelle of the Temptress” does not appear in the revised edition of 1982. ↩ See Ellmann, 1959, 153-6 and Gabler, “Seven,” 25. ↩ Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) 78-80, 401-2, 462-3.

↩ The central exchange over how Stephen’s villanelle should be read and how judged took place between Wayne Booth and Robert Scholes in the early nineteen-sixties: see Wayne Booth, “The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of the Artist,” The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1961) and Robert Scholes, “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” PMLA 79 (1964 Sept): 484-9. Both are reprinted in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, Ed. Chester G. Anderson, The Viking Critical Library (New York: Viking Press, 1968). Booth asks, “Finally, what of the precious villanelle? Does Joyce intend it to be taken as a serious sign of Stephen’s artistry, as a sign of his genuine but amusingly pretentious precocity, or as something else entirely?” (466); Scholes answers that “Joyce has deliberately set out in his description of Stephen’s inspiration to fulfill the theoretical requirements he had himself set up for such inspiration.

The inspiration and the poem are both intended to be genuine” (480). Booth declares that the degree of Joyce’s distance from Stephen’s villanelle cannot be determined, but his language (“the precious villanelle”) shows that he, unlike Scholes, does not admire the poem. Most subsequent critics have tended toward an essentially Boothian reading, in which Joyce as author intends us to keep a certain ironic distance from “Villanelle of the Temptress,” though not necessarily from Stephen’s aesthetic theories nor from his intent to become an artist. ¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Other articles (in chronological order) that examine Joyce’s villanelle are Charles Rossman, “Stephen Dedalus’ Villanelle,” James Joyce Quarterly 12 (1975): 281-93; Bernard Benstock, “The Temptation of St. Stephen: A View of the Villanelle,” James Joyce Quarterly 14.31-8 (1976); Mary T.

Reynolds, “Joyce’s Villanelle and D’annunzio’s Sonnet Sequence,” Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976): 19-45; Zack Bowen, “Stephen’s Villanelle: Antecedents, Manifestations, and Aftermath,” Modern British Literature 5 (1980): 63-7; Manfred Pfister, “Die Villanelle in Der Englischen Moderne: Joyce, Empson, Dylan Thomas,” Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 219.2 (1982): 296-312; Angela Habermann, “The Joycean Faun,” International Fiction Review 10.1 (1983): 44-7; Robert Adams Day, “The Villanelle Perplex: Reading Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 25.1 (1987): 69-85; and Christine Froula, “Modernity, Drafts, Genetic Criticism: On the Virtual Lives of James Joyce’s Villanelle,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 113-29

.

The best of these, to my mind, is Day’s 1987 article, whose conclusions I cite in my own text. ↩ See Constantine FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book (Boston: Little Brown, 1965) 326. In a written response to questions from a student writing a thesis on Thomas, the poet wrote: Dylan Thomas | Poetry Foundation Poetry Foundation Poet Details 1914–1953 The work of Dylan Thomas has occasioned much critical commentary, although critics share no consensus on how bright his star shines in the galaxy of modern poetry. In fact, it is a curious phenomenon that so many critics seem obsessed with deciding once and for all whether Thomas's poems belong side by side with those of T. S. Eliot and W. H.

Auden , or whether they are—in the words of a reputable critic quoted by Henry Treece in Dylan Thomas: "Dog Among the Fairies"—"intellectual fakes of the highest class." The latter is definitely a minority opinion; yet even Treece, an acquaintance of Thomas's, had to admit that the poet's work is "extremely ill-balanced." The estimation of the work has often been colored by an estimation of the man. Until Constantine FitzGibbon's The Life of Dylan Thomas in 1965, Thomas's biography was dominated by numerous unflattering published reminiscences, among them the graphically detailed account of John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America, concerning, in part, the poet's drinking and philandering during his last years in America. Though FitzGibbon sympathetically glossed over Thomas's drinking habits, the facts reported by Brinnin and others and corroborated in Paul Ferris's Dylan Thomas support the idea that Thomas frequently drank to excess, and that such drinking adversely affected his social behavior. Personal details such as these tended to render objective evaluations of the poetry difficult.

Indeed, the legend of Dylan Thomas grew: the hard-drinking bard, the erratic chanter of his own songs, the romantic artist at odds with the modern world. Thomas began writing poetry as a child, publishing his work in school magazines. By 1930 he had taken to writing poems in penny notebooks; a number of his poems were published in the "Poet's Corner" of the Sunday Referee and in the influential New Verse. Ralph Maud, in Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry, declared that the writer's first published poem was the subsequently popular "And death shall have no dominion," which appeared on May 8, 1933, in the New English Weekly. The notebooks in which Thomas composed between 1930 and 1934, when he was sixteen to twenty years old, reveal the young poet's struggle with a number of personal crises, the origins of which are rather obscure.

In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg described them as "related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one's identity." Revised versions of some of the notebooks' poems became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems. Eighteen Poems was published in December, 1934, a short time after Thomas moved to London. The volume received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably. Ferris quoted from an anonymous review in the Morning Post that called the poems "individual but not private" and went on to strike a note that later became a frequent criticism: "a psychologist would observe Mr. Thomas's constant use of images and epithets which are secretory or glandular." Ferris also quoted a critic for Time and Tide, who wrote: "This is not merely a book of unusual promise; it is more probably the sort of bomb that bursts not more than once in three years." The book was also reviewed favorably by Spectator, New Verse, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words—with their sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings. This richness of meaning, an often illogical and revolutionary syntax, and catalogues of cosmic and sexual imagery render Thomas's early poetry original and difficult. In a letter to Richard Church, included by FitzGibbon in Selected Letters, Thomas commented on what he considered some of his own excesses: "Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence." Similarly, in a letter to Glyn Jones, he wrote: "My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I'm afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy." This discussion of the difficulty of Eighteen Poems does not discount the fact that most of the poems have yielded their meanings to persistent readers—and books like William York Tindall's A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas and Clark Emery's The World of Dylan Thomas aid the reader's comprehension.

Such poems as "I see the boys of summer," "A process in the weather of the heart," and the popular "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" merit repeated readings, both for the artistic pleasure they give through their highly structured forms and for their embodiment of some of the key themes that run throughout the volume and, indeed, throughout much of Thomas's work. Among these themes are the unity of time, the similarity between creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living things. This last theme was identified by Elder Olson in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas as part of the tradition of the microcosm-macrocosm: "He analogizes the anatomy of man to the structure of the universe . . . and sees the human microcosm as an image of the macrocosm, and conversely." During the almost two years between the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934 and Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Thomas moved back and forth between London and Wales a great deal. In London he began to meet influential people in the literary world: Herbert Read, Geoffrey Grigson, Norman Cameron, and Vernon Watkins, among others.

He became particularly close to Watkins, an older man whose sedate lifestyle contrasted markedly with Thomas's. Watkins and Thomas would criticize each other's poetry, and Watkins became a frequent source of money for the continually destitute Thomas. At this time Thomas was carrying on a mostly long-distance relationship with the poet and novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, later the wife of novelist C. P. Snow. While the affair lasted—it was finally torn asunder by Thomas's drinking—Thomas shared with her in letters his personal insecurities and his misgivings about his work.

Paul Ferris cited this letter written from Laugharne, Wales, circa May 21, 1934: "I am tortured today by every doubt and misgiving that an hereditarily twisted imagination, an hereditary thirst and a commercial quenching, a craving for a body not my own, a chequered education and too much egocentric poetry, and a wild, wet day in a tided town, are capable of conjuring up out of their helly deeps." During this period Thomas's drinking became a serious problem, and his friends would sometimes take him off to out-of-the-way places in Cornwall and Ireland to remove him from temptation with the hope that he would do more writing. Thomas's second volume of poetry, Twenty-five Poems, was published in September, 1936.

Most of the poems were revised from the notebooks; FitzGibbon reported in The Life of Dylan Thomas that "only six entirely new poems, that is to say poems written in the year and a half between the publication of [ Eighteen Poems] and the despatch of the second volume to the printers, are to be found in that volume." Ferris noted that "the reviews were generally favourable, but with one exception they were not as enthusiastic as they were for [ Eighteen Poems]." This exception, however, almost assured the volume's commercial success; it was a laudatory review by Dame Edith Sitwell in the Sunday Times. As cited by Ferris, 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." Though most of the works in Twenty-five Poems were mined from older material, the volume includes a significant sonnet sequence of ten poems, "Altarwise by owl-light," written in Ireland the year before publication.

In these sonnets Thomas moved from the pre-Christian primitivism of most of the Eighteen Poems to a Christian mythology based upon love. G. S. Fraser commented in Vision and Rhetoric that "the sonnets, a failure as a whole, splendid in parts . . . are important because they announce the current of orthodox Christian feeling—feeling rather than thought—which was henceforth increasingly to dominate Thomas's work in poetry." Olson saw these sonnets as a break with the past, in method as well as philosophic-religious outlook: "It is notable that after the 'Altarwise by owl-light' sonnets, he discards nearly all of this particular body of symbols, transforms the remainder and gradually develops new symbols and new diction to correspond with his changing view of life." Olson, who worked out an elaborate schema of interpretation involving Hercules in the zodiac, also called these sonnets "surely among the greatest poems of the century." Tindall remarked in A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas that the theme of these sonnets is really Thomas himself.

Tindall commented, "Although cheerfully allowing the presence of Jesus, Hercules, the stars, the zodiac, and a generally neglected voyage, I think them analogies, not to be confused with the theme." Korg, commenting on the obscurity of the sequence, said that "all that is reasonably clear is that it concerns the crucifixion and the resurrection as foci of spiritual conflict." While much of the attention given to Twenty-five Poems has been focused on the religious sonnets, the volume as a whole contains indications of a shift in emphasis in Thomas's writing. Richard Morton noted in An Outline of the Works of Dylan Thomas that the poems of this volume are "concerned with the relationship between the poet and his environment," particularly the natural environment.

"In Twenty-five Poems, we can see the beginnings of the pastoral mode which reaches its fulfillment in the great lyrics of Thomas's last poems." And, as Korg said, "at least three of the poems in the second volume are about the poet's reactions to other people, themes of an entirely different class from those of [ Eighteen Poems]; and these three anticipate [Thomas's] turning outward in his later poems toward such subjects as his aunt's funeral, the landscape, and his relations with his wife and children." Some of the best poems in the book are rather straightforward pieces—"This bread break," "The hand that signed the paper," "And death shall have no dominion"—but others, such as "I, in my intricate image," are as involved and abstruse as the poems of the earlier volume. Derek Stanford noted that still "there are traces of doubt, questioning, and despair in many of these pieces." Thomas, however, chose to place the optimistic "And death shall have no dominion" at the end of the volume.

This poem has always been one of Thomas's most popular works, perhaps because, as Clark Emery noted, it was "published in a time when notes of affirmation—philosophical, political, or otherwise—did not resound among intelligent liberal humanists, [and thus] it answered an emotional need. . . . It affirmed without sentimentalizing; it expressed a faith without theologizing." The "Altarwise by owl-light" poems as well as "And death shall have no dominion" inevitably raise questions concerning the extent to which Dylan Thomas can be called a religious writer. In an essay for A Casebook on Dylan Thomas W. S. Merwin was one of the first to deal with this issue; he found Thomas to be a religious writer because he was a "celebrator in the ritual sense: a maker and performer of a rite. . . . That which he celebrates is creation, and more particularly the human condition." However, the positions on this issue can be—and have been—as various as the definitions of what constitutes a religious outlook.

At one end of the scale, critics do not dispute that Thomas used religious imagery in his poetry; at the other end, critics generally agree that, at least during certain periods of his creative life, Thomas's vision was not that of any orthodox religious system. The range of interpretations was summarized by R. B. Kershner, Jr., in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics: "He has been called a pagan, a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love, Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself." On July 11, 1937, Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara; they were penniless and lacked the blessings of their parents. After spending some time with each of their reluctant families, they moved to a borrowed house in Laugharne, Wales. This fishing village became their permanent address, though they lived in many temporary dwellings in England and Wales through the war years and after, until Thomas's death in 1953. The borrowing of houses and money became recurring events in their married life together.

Korg associated these external circumstances in the poet's life with his artistic development: "Thomas's time of settling in Laugharne coincides roughly with the period when his poetry began to turn outward; his love for Caitlin, the birth of his first child, Llewellyn, responses to the Welsh countryside and its people, and ultimately events of the war began to enter his poetry as visible subjects." Thomas's third book, The Map of Love, appeared in August, 1939, the year war broke out in Europe. It comprised a strange union of sixteen poems and seven stories, the stories having been previously published in periodicals. The volume was a commercial failure, perhaps because of the war. Ferris reported that "the book was respectfully and sometimes warmly reviewed, with a few dissenters"; yet these works of Thomas's middle period are his least successful. The short stories are inferior to those that appeared the next year in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are mannered, misty, cumbersome—dealing often with dreams and vague imaginings. Some of these stories have been called surrealistic, opening up a vein of controversy, since Thomas often disavowed his use of surrealism.

Annis Pratt, in Dylan Thomas's Early Prose, suggested that although surrealistic features exist in the stories, Thomas exercised careful control over his material. She quoted Thomas on this point: "I do not mind from where the images of a poem are dragged up; drag them up, if you like, from the nethermost sea of the hidden self; but, before they reach paper, they must go through all the rational processes of the intellect." While the poems of The Map of Love, with one or two exceptions, are not among the best Thomas wrote, they are interesting for the light they shed on his development of a more outward-looking and less cosmic aesthetic. At least one of the poems, "I make this in a warring absence," treats an early marital conflict with Caitlin. "If my head hurt a hair's foot" appears to be a celebration of the birth of the poet's son. Two very interesting poems have to do with the uncertainties of the poet. Clark Emery has associated "On no work of words" with Coleridge's "Dejection" and Milton's Sonnet XVI in its lament over lost powers and the passage of time.

"After the funeral," considered the best poem of the volume, is an elegy for his rural aunt, Ann Jones. John Fuller concluded in an essay from Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays that "the poem rehearses for Thomas the idea that out of the practice of grief can come real grief and love." In sharp contrast to the stories in The Map of Love are those published the following year, 1940, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas claimed in a letter to Vernon Watkins that he "kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons." He also said that the title was not a parody of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a dubious proposition—though he did acknowledge the general influence of Joyce's Dubliners. These Thomas stories are different from the earlier ones in their particularity of character and place, their straightforward plot lines, and their relevance to Thomas's childhood in Wales.

Thomas wrote to Watkins in August, 1939: "I've been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas." Reviews of the book were mixed, and it didn't sell well at the time, though it later became enormously popular. According to Ferris, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found that "the atmosphere of schoolboy smut and practical jokes and poetry is evoked with lingering accuracy but with nothing more." Subsequent critics have detected more in the stories, though most agree that Thomas is primarily a poet and only secondarily a writer of fiction. Korg commented that "taken as a group, [the stories] seem to trace the child's emergence from his domain of imagination and secret pleasures into an adult world where he observes suffering, pathos, and dignity." Two of the more successful stories in the collection are "The Peaches"—the first story—and "One Warm Saturday"—the last. "The Peaches" features a youthful main character named Dylan who goes to his aunt's farm for a holiday; this is quite clearly the farm of Ann Jones of "After the funeral" and the farm celebrated in " Fern Hill ." Harold F.

Mosher, Jr., in his Studies in Short Fiction essay, summed up the conflict of the story and the means by which it is dramatized: "Through the juxtaposition of characters, the opposition of images, and the variation of pace and tempo, Thomas unifies his story and clarifies the conflict between imaginative life and dull existence." "One Warm Saturday" contains disillusionment comparable to that found in Joyce's story "Araby." After falling in love with a girl in a park and drinking with her and her friends in a bar, the hero of the story goes with the group to the girl's apartment, but loses his way in the hall after going to the bathroom and never finds the apartment again. Once more, this story depicts the conflict between the imaginative dreams of love and the real world of pain and confusion.

In his Studies in Short Fiction essay Richard Kelly contrasted this story with Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Whereas Joyce's wading girl provides [the main character] with aesthetic and emotional autonomy, the girl in the antiromantic 'One Warm Saturday' fills the young man with anguish and frustration and returns him to an ugly, hostile world." Constantine FitzGibbon reported that Thomas considered World War II a "personal affront." For a while he contemplated filing for conscientious objector status, but in the end he seems to have avoided service because of medical problems. Ferris quoted Thomas's mother, who claimed "punctured lungs" were the reason he didn't serve. Ferris suggested that the disability may have been a psychological one. Whatever his particular unfitness, Thomas was able to secure employment during the war years writing documentary scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While he considered it hack work, it provided the first regular income since his newspaper days and also allowed him to spend a good deal of time in London pubs. This pragmatic writing was the beginning of a career that Thomas pursued until his death; it did not, however, replace what he considered his more important work, the writing of poems.

In addition to the documentaries, he wrote radio scripts and eventually screenplays for feature films. Though his income from these activities was moderate, it did not allow him and Caitlin relief from debt or their friends relief from the frequent begging letters. In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published. It is essentially the time-honored story of a country boy in the big city. Annis Pratt commented that Thomas intended the story to be "a series of 'adventures' in which the hero's 'skins' would be stripped off one by one like a snake's until he was left in a kind of quintessential nakedness to face the world." Thomas's work next saw publication in a 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," " Poem in October ," "The Hunchback in the Park," and " Fern Hill ." Deaths and Entrances was an instant success.

Ferris noted that three thousand copies sold in the first month after its publication and that the publisher, Dent, ordered a reprint of the same number. In Vision and Rhetoric G. S. Fraser said of the volume that "it increases the impression of variety and of steady development, which the earlier volumes, read in the order of their appearance, give." T. H. Jones, in his Dylan Thomas, declared the volume to be the core of Thomas's achievement. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, while still provoking arguments about interpretation, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like "Fern Hill," illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. As Jacob Korg said of these poems, "the figures and landscapes have a new solidity, a new self-sufficiency, and the dialectic vision no longer penetrates them as though they were no more than windows opening on a timeless universe." "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," one of Thomas's more accessible poems, illustrates well the almost sacramental view of nature that characterizes this later poetry.

At the same time it is topical in its reference to the firebombing of London during the war. The child, like the poet, enters the "synagogue of corn," the holiness of nature, at her death. Yet the poem is richly ambiguous in its final line, "After the first death, there is no other." As Tindall observed, this statement can be taken either as a pledge of eternal life or as a realization that death is death, that one is dead forever—or both. "Fern Hill" presents a similar sacramental imagery—"And the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams"—and a pervasive sense of unity between the speaker and nature. But over the whole poem broods "Time," which at the end is triumphant: "Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea." In an essay for English Journal Jack L. Jenkins summarized: "The predominate tone of the poem is still green, touched by the bittersweet knowledge of the last lines but green nonetheless.

There is nothing harsh or bitter or dark about the poem, only an inevitable acceptance of the irony." Mention has already been made of Thomas's obsession with words, and while these later poems in Deaths and Entrances are less compressed than the earlier ones, they reveal no less verbal facility or less concern for what is generally called poetic style. Thomas was always a highly individual stylist. Sound was as important as sense in his poems—some would even say more important. He made ample use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and approximate rhyme. In The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, William T. Moynihan describes his rhythm as "accentual syllabic": "its stress pattern generally sounds as though it is iambic, but this very justifiable assumption cannot always be borne out by traditional scansion. Thomas may, in fact, have depended upon an iambic expectancy, as he varied his rhythms beyond any customary iambic formulation and then—by completely unprecedented innovations—created his own rhythm, which is very close to iambic." By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal.

For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Kershner asserted that Thomas "became the wild man from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure with racial access to roots of experience which more civilized Londoners lacked." His drinking, his democratic tendencies, and the frank sexual imagery of his poetry made him the focal point of an ill-defined artistic rebellion. In 1949 Thomas and his family moved to the Boat House of Laugharne, Wales, a house provided for them by one of Thomas's benefactors, Mrs. Margaret Taylor. For the last four years of his life he moved between this dwelling and the United States, where he went on four separate tours to read his poetry and receive the adulation of the American public. The often sordid accounts of these tours are provided in John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America. Thomas's last separate volume of poetry before the Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (1952) was Country Sleep, published by New Directions in the United States in 1952.

As originally published, this book contained six of the poet's most accomplished works: "Over Sir John's Hill," "Poem on his Birthday," "Do not go gentle into that good night," "Lament," "In the white giant's thigh," and "In country sleep." Concerning this volume, Rushworth M. Kidder commented in Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit that "the fact of physical death seems to present itself to the poet as something more than distant event. . . . These poems come to terms with death through a form of worship: not propitiatory worship of Death as deity, but worship of a higher Deity by whose power all things, including death, are controlled." Tindall called these poems "Thomas at his mellowest." In "Do not go gentle into that good night," a poem written during his father's illness and in anticipation of his death, the son exhorts the father to affirm life in his dying.

Similarly, though the women of "In the white giant's thigh" have died childless, the poet, as Korg pointed out, "memorializes their vitality by means of the paradox that their fertility survives through the memory of their many loves." It has already been mentioned that Thomas began writing scripts during the war. Several of his film scripts have been published, including The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesa. Neither of these was produced, but they gave Thomas the opportunity to develop his dramatic skills. These skills culminated in his radio play, Under Milk Wood, written over a long period of time and frantically revised in America during the last months of his life. The play grew out of the story "Quite Early One Morning," which was broadcast by the BBC in 1945. Under Milk Wood is set in a small Welsh town called Llareggub and covers one day in the lives of its provincial characters. These characters are disembodied voices who reveal their nighttime dreams and their daily monotonous lives.

Richard Morton commented that "the trivialities of small-town life are more than evocative, however; they are presented to us in ceremonial order, as though they have a kind of esoteric significance." The characters in the play are satisfied with their lives, and Thomas himself seems to accept and affirm their rural simplicity. Raymond Williams, in an essay for Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, said that Under Milk Wood is "not a mature work, but the retained extravagance of an adolescent's imaginings. Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is not the least of its dramatic virtues." Thomas read the play as a solo performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953; the first group reading was on May 14. In the following November, Dylan Thomas died in New York of ailments complicated by alcohol and drug abuse. Publication of the rest of Thomas's BBC work occurred in 1992 with the release of On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts. This volume includes all of Thomas's radio work with the exception of Under the Milk Wood.

Peter Thorpe, writing for the Bloomsbury Review noted the immense power of Thomas's voice during these broadcasts, which "[tended] to overwhelm us with its incantational rhythms, its intoxicating iterations." Thorpe commented that the advantage of having these works in print "is that it allows his 'senior' followers . . . to assess a significant part of his work with the eye rather than the ear." The originality that is the hallmark of Thomas's work makes categorization very difficult. As Kershner commented, "The fact remains that Thomas throughout his career stayed generally aloof from literary cliques, groups, and movements." Unlike other prominent writers of the 1930s—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender , for example—Thomas had little use for socialistic ideas in his art. He seems to have admired much of T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry but became disenchanted with what Kershner called Eliot's "unsensual and religious poetry." It is safe to say that Thomas was influenced by such modern movements as symbolism and surrealism, but he borrowed without adhering to any creed.

He was particularly concerned with disassociating himself from the surrealist movement because he felt his conscious craftsmanship was contrary to the methods of that group. In the late 1930s and the 1940s a movement called the Apocalypse, which heralded myth and decried the machine and politics, claimed Thomas for its own; but though he did say he mostly believed in its principles, he refused to sign the group's manifesto. Clearly, Thomas can be seen as an extension into the twentieth century of the general movement called romanticism, particularly in its emphasis on imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form; but attempts to identify him with a particular "neo-romantic" school have failed. As Kershner said, "The historical perspective, while valuable, is self-limiting; poetry either crosses temporal boundaries or else it has no essential purpose." That Dylan Thomas wrote poems that cross temporal boundaries guarantees their essential purpose. The boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, that served as the inspiration for Llaregguh in Under Milk Wood is threatened by nearby construction.

City officials are working to prevent damage to the building from the trucks working on expanding Ferry House, which serves as a tourist center for those visiting Thomas's homestead. Bibliography Eighteen Poems, Sunday Referee and Parton Bookshop, 1934. Twenty-five Poems, Dent, 1936. New Poems, New Directions, 1943. Deaths and Entrances, Dent, 1946, revised edition edited with notes by Walford Davies, illustrated by John Piper, Gwasg Gregynog, 1984. Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, New Directions, 1946, revised edition edited by J. P. Harries, Heinemann, 1970. Twenty-six Poems, Dent, 1950. In Country Sleep and Other Poems, Dent, 1952.

Collected Poems, 1934-1952, Dent, 1952, published as The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Directions, 1953, reprinted, 1971, reprinted as Collected Poems, 1934-1952, Dent, 1984. The Colour of Saying: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas, edited by Ralph Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies, Dent, 1963, published as Dylan Thomas's Choice, New Directions, 1964. Collected Poems, Dutton, 1966. Poem in October, Coach House Press, 1970. The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Directions, 1971, revised edition, Dent, 1978. Poems, edited by Daniel Jones, Dent, 1974. Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas, Dent, 1975. The Green Fuse: A Collection of Poems and Wood Engravings, Tairiku No Taiwa Sha (Tokyo, Japan), 1982.

Wales in His Arms: Dylan Thomas's Choice of Welsh Poetry, University of Wales Press (Cardiff, Wales), 1994. Dylan Thomas, the Filmscripts, J. M. Dent (London, England), 1995. Dylan Thomas Selected Poems, 1934-1952, New Directions (New York, NY), 2003. Poems represented in anthologies; contributor of poems to periodicals, including Living Age, Poetry, New English Weekly, and New Verse. SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, AND OTHER WRITINGS Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (autobiographical short stories; includes "Peaches" and "One Warm Saturday"), New Directions, 1940, reprinted, 1956. Quite Early One Morning, preface and notes by Aneirin Talfan Davies, Dent, 1954, enlarged edition, New Directions, 1954. A Child's Christmas in Wales, New Directions, 1955, new edition illustrated with woodcuts, 1959, Godine, 1984.

A Prospect of the Sea, and Other Stories and Prose Writings, edited by Daniel Jones, Dent, 1955. Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories, New Directions, 1955 (published in England as Adventures in the Skin Trade, with a foreword by Vernon Watkins, Putnam [London], 1955, new edition with drawings by Ceri Richards, 1982). The Collected Prose of Dylan Thomas, New Directions, 1969. Early Prose Writings of Dylan Thomas, edited by Walford Davies, Dent, 1971, reprinted, 1983, New Directions, 1972. The Collected Stories, Dent, 1983, New Directions, 1984. Eight Stories, New Directions, 1993. The Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1985. On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, edited by Ralph Maud, New Directions (New York, NY), 1992.

Dylan Thomas, the Filmscripts, edited by John Ackerman (J. M. Dent (London, England), 1995. The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas, Sourcebooks Casablanca (Naperville, IL), 2001. Short stories represented in anthologies, including Welsh Short Stories, Faber, 1937, and Short Story Study: A Critical Anthology, edited by A. Smith and W. H. Mason, Edward Arnold, 1961. Contributor of short stories and essays to periodicals, including New English Weekly, New World Writing, Life and Letters Today, Janus, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Delta, and Mademoiselle. POETRY AND PROSE COLLECTIONS The World I Breathe, New Directions, 1939. The Map of Love, Dent, 1939. Miscellany: Poems, Stories, Broadcasts, Dent 1963, reprinted as Miscellany One: Poems, Stories, Broadcasts, 1974.

Miscellany Two: A Visit to Grandpa's, and Other Stories and Poems, Dent, 1966. Miscellany Three: Poems and Stories, Dent, 1978. LETTERS AND NOTEBOOKS Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Constantine FitzGibbon, Dent, 1956, published as Selected Letters, New Directions, 1967. Letters to Vernon Watkins, edited with introduction by Vernon Watkins, New Directions, 1957. The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, edited by Ralph Maud, New Directions, 1967 (published in England as Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, Dent, 1968). Twelve More Letters, Daedalus Press, 1969. Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Paul Ferris, Macmillan, 1985. FILM SCRIPTS The Doctor and the Devils (based on a short story by Donald Taylor), New Directions, 1953, published with an introduction by John Ormond, Time, 1964.

The Beach of Falesa (based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson), Stein & Day, 1963, 2nd edition, 1983. Twenty Years A-Growing (based on a short story by Maurice O'Sullivan), Dent, 1964. The Doctor and the Devils, and Other Scripts, New Directions, 1966. Me and My Bike (unfinished screenplay; introduction by Sydney Box, illustrations by Leonora Box), McGraw, 1965. Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, edited by John Ackerman, Dent (London), 1995. Also author or co-author of numerous educational film scripts for the British Ministry of Information. SOUND RECORDINGS Selections from the Writings of Dylan Thomas (five records), Caedmon, 1952-60. Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (two records), Argo, 1954. An Evening with Dylan Thomas Reading His Own and Other Poems, Caedmon, 1963. Dylan Thomas Reading His Complete Recorded Poetry (two records), Caedmon, 1963.

Dylan Thomas Reading from His Own Work, Caedmon, 1971. In Country Heaven: The Evolution of a Poem, Caedmon, 1971. The Complete Recorded Stories and Humorous Essays, Caedmon, 1972. Return Journey to Swansea (radio play; performed by Thomas and a supporting cast), Caedmon, 1972. Dylan Thomas Reads from His Adventures in the Skin Trade and Two Poems, Caedmon, 1975. OTHER Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (first produced in New York City at the Young Men's/Young Women's Hebrew Association, May 14, 1953), New Directions, 1954, new edition, with preface and musical settings by Daniel Jones, published as Under Milk Wood: A Play in Two Acts, 1958, new edition, Dent, 1962. Conversation about Christmas, privately printed, 1954.

Quite Early One Morning: Broadcasts by Dylan Thomas, with preface and notes by Ichiro Nishizaki and Nobutko Suto, Hokuseido Press (Tokyo), 1956. Rebecca's Daughters, Little, Brown, 1965. Two Tales: Me and My Bike [and] Rebecca's Daughters, illustrated by Leonora Box, Sphere, 1968. (With John Davenport) The Death of the King's Canary (novel), introduction by Constantine FitzGibbon, Hutchinson, 1977. On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, edited by Ralph Maud, New Directions, 1992. Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poems by Dylan Thomas

Question: Who wrote the collection of autobiographical short stories- 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog' in 1940?
Answer: Dylan Thomas