The Collected Letters

by Ferris

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the poet and his times to life in a way that almost no biography can. First published by J. M. Dent in 1985, Thomas's Collected Letters received exceptional reviews, both for the scholarship of the editor, and for the quality of the collection. This new edition will bring the letters back into print at a time when interest is renewed in the life of this exceptional writer. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays, and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on his own work and on his friends, as well as unguarded and certainly unpolitical comments on the work of his contemporaries - T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender among others. ('Spender should be kicked...Day-Lewis hissed in public and have his balls beaten with a toffee hammer') More than a hundred new letters have been added since Paul Ferris edited the first edition of the Collected Letters in 1985. They cast Thomas's adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. Thomas's letters tell a remarkable story, each letter taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him.

Genres: Poetry, Biography, Nonfiction

982 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Ian Banks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm really conflicted about Dylan Thomas. On the one hand, he was quite a progressive in many ways, affecting some conservative, old-fashioned mannerisms for effect but showing a truly modern spirit in his writing and championing quite a few writers from backgrounds quite different to his own. On the other hand he was quite the sponger and about one third of the letters in this collection feature him asking someone for money for various reasons and showing that he, while not an uncaring spouse or father, was unwilling to do anything other than write for a living, even when creditors were banging his doors down.

I'm also of the belief that he was extremely blessed in his friends, who were able to see some sort of worth in him that they were willing to go to the lengths that they did to support him. I'm fairly sure that he'd've loved Twitter and Patreon and all the other perks of our modern age.

But, ultimately, he was a gifted writer and poet who should have lived longer than he did and produced more than he did (surely and epithet all writers aspire to?) which is where these letters truly shine: written for an audience of one, we can see the true talent of someone who really loves what the language can do when you push it to its limit. Painfully punny, quite quippy, lusciously lubricious, routinely ribald, often very honest, sometimes diplomatic and coy to a fault, here we have a true self-portrait of an artist as a young dog, artist, man and poet.

[Loraxe · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways I wish I had never read these letters as they are almost too intimate a portrait of a writer who was not the most pleasant man but yet could work the english language in ways that nobody else has ever been able to do. The ill health, the drinking, and the money problems are not exactly entertaining reading but they certainly are enlightening.

[Sean Evans]

The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas by Ferris (1986)