A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas

by William York Tindall

Dylan Thomas is one of the most brilliant and difficult of modem poets. Pantheist, surrealist, bard, his extraordinary poems present problems for even the most expert reader. Thomas, like Joyce, is a writer who almost demands acts of exegesis. A friend of Thomas and one of the leading experts in the country on modern writing, William York Tindall brings both enormous erudition and high literary sensitivity to his poem-by-poem analysis of the great Welsh poet's verse.

Genres: Poetry

305 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

William York Tindall was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University. Several of Tindall's classic works of criticism, including A Reader's Guide to James Joyce and A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake are still in print. He wrote a total of thirteen books on UK and Irish writers including Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Tindall nominated Beckett for the Nobel Prize in Literature; Beckett was the 1969 laureate.

Reviews

[Ben Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential companion to Thomas's Collected Poems. Tindall's commentary is detailed and insightful, but does not pretend to be the final word on Thomas's polysemous words.