Hugh Oaf do Wet’s sculpture of Dylan Thomas’s head with the stub of a small cigar jutting from his mouth is the black and white illustration facing the title page of James A. Davies’s book. In his Introduction Davies writes that his “reference companion offers a candid account of Thomas’s life” warts and all. The companion discusses Thomas’s work as “constantly alive to its own time”, and “offers a selective critical history”. Davies provides a reconsideration of its subject in the light of “the increasing concern with British literatures in English (Scottish, Irish, Anglo‐Welsh)”.
Following five pages of chronological summary of Thomas’s life and work James A. Davies’s study is divided into three sections; life, works and critical history. Dylan Thomas’s life is treated by four chronologically‐arranged sections covering the years 1914‐1934, 1934‐1944, 1944‐1949, and 1950‐1953. The discussion of Thomas’s output is divided into ten sections. The first two, “Juvenilia and the Notebooks” and “From Notebooks to Final Text: Three Examples”, concentrate on the earliest work and early drafts. Four sections then follow focussing on individual poems found in the published collections 18 Poems (1934), Twenty Five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939). There is a chapter on the short stories included in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), and more than six pages on “Minor Prose”. Included under this rubric are brief discussions of the unfinished story The Death of the King’s Canary written in 1940 in collaboration with John Davenport, and Adventures in the Skin Trade written in 1941. There are two pages on Dylan Thomas’s reviewing activities, which mainly “took place between 1934 and 1939”. Poems found in Deaths and Entrances (1946) regarded by Davies as “Dylan Thomas’s finest volume”, receive detailed attention. The completed six poems Thomas wrote after the publication of the volume are considered in “Late Poems”. There is a lengthy section devoted to Under Milk Wood. Broadcasts, the letters, especially those to Pamela Hansford Johnson, Vernon Watkins and his wife Caitlin, are treated. The filmscripts and Under Milk Wood also receive separate critical discussion in “Towards Under Milk Wood”. This section concludes with a too brief account of “Dylan Thomas as a Reader”.
The third section “Critical History” opens with an analysis of its subject’s reception in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement which reviewed all of Thomas’s British publications during his lifetime. Davies concludes: “as Thomas’s life and death recede from the present, they receive more and more attention and appear to rouse ever more intense and usually hostile feelings”. There follow sections on “Dylan Thomas in Wales”, “Dylan Thomas in England”, and finally “Dylan Thomas in North America”. There is an unannotated select bibliography divided into works by Dylan Thomas, manuscripts, bibliographies and works on Dylan Thomas: a select list. There is a detailed index including individual poems listed under their titles.
Sturdily bound for lengthy reference shelf life and usage, with pleasant computer‐generated print, this is a highly commended reference work. Davies writes sensibly and without recourse to terminology. His commentaries on individual poems are clear and perceptive. His account of critical reactions to Thomas provides a commentary on crucial issues and debates in Anglo‐American twentieth‐century literary criticism. Hopefully, A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas will encourage its readers to return to Dylan Thomas’s work and to the insightfulness of critical voices such as those of Barbara Hardy and David Daiches. The eternal verities of such critics transcend the utterances of those who take refuge in such fashionable terms as “post deconstruction” and “post colonial” critical discourse. James A. Davies has produced an indispensable reference volume for collections in British and American literature, drama and criticism. Purchase.
