Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth.
The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas's most challenging poems, 'I, in my intricate image' and 'Altarwise by owl-light', and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics - many with substantial reworkings and variant passages - this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.
Feldman, Matthew: - Matthew Feldman is Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas, Professional Fellow at the University of York, UK.
Goodby, John: - John Goodby is Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He is the author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013) and editor of the centenary edition of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (2014).
Osbourne, Adrian: - Adrian Osbourne conducted his doctoral research as the co-editor of Dylan Thomas's fifth notebook, funded by Swansea University's College of Arts & Humanities. He gained his PhD in January 2020, and is currently working on a network visualization project, investigating the correspondence of Modernist writers held in the archives at Swansea University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas
Thomas, Dylan: - Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914. After leaving school he worked briefly as a junior reporter on the South Wales Evening Post before deciding to embark on a freelance literary career. He rapidly established himself as a remarkable personality and one of the finest poets of his generation. 18 Poems appeared in 1934, Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and In Country Sleep in 1952. His Collected Poems was published in 1952. Throughout his life, Thomas also wrote short stories, his most famous collection being Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He also wrote film scripts, was a celebrated broadcaster of radio features and talks, lectured widely in America, and wrote the radio play Under Milk Wood, first broadcast posthumously in 1954.
Tonning, Erik: - Erik Tonning is Professor of English at NLA University College, Norway, and Professor II of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is co-editor of the Modernist Archives series and the Historicizing Modernism series, both published by Bloomsbury. He is the author of Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama and Modernism and Christianity, as well as the editor of a number of volumes on modernism.
