Discovering Dylan Thomas: a Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems by John Goodby

Author:John Goodby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783169658
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Appendix 1

A note on the text of Collected Poems (2014)

and publication details for individual volumes

In determining the texts of individual poems for CP14, I had an eye to the circumstances in which they were edited and proofed by Thomas himself. We know that although he dealt pretty well with the proofs for the Collected Poems (1952), he managed to miss several misprints, and this has led me to check all the poems in it against the five individual volumes it incorporated. These present their own problems. We know, for example, that 18 Poems was well proofed, with no typographical errors in the first edition. But a reset 1942 edition by the Fortune Press introduced many misprints; and this, not the 1934 edition, was used by Dent as their source text in 1952. Not all of its errors were weeded out, and many survived until 1988. Some misprints were notoriously long-lived. ‘This bread I break’ in Twenty-five Poems, for example, has ‘Once in this wind’ for ‘Once in this wine’, and though Thomas knew about it by 1937, he forgot to correct it in 1952. TML (1939), by contrast, has no textual errors; but there are two points where stanza breaks coincide with the foot of a page, and this led to the compositor of the 1952 Collected to eliminate them, fusing stanzas which should have remained separate. The proof-sheets of DE do not survive, but we know that Thomas missed three misprints, and that a line was lost from ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ which was not restored in 1952. Finally, Thomas made handwritten changes to some poems in the copy of In Country Sleep owned by his friend Ruthven Todd; following Davies and Maud, I have incorporated these. The 1952 Collected Poems was quirky in other ways, too; it placed fussy commas around parentheses, and dropped stanza six of ‘When once the twilight locks’; the commas have now gone and the stanza is restored. The 1988 edition, otherwise exemplary, contained two misprints (‘caldron’ for ‘cauldron’ in ‘Vision and Prayer’, ‘tonges’ for ‘tongues’ in ‘Shall gods be said’), both corrected in CP14.

The history of the publication of Thomas’s volumes of poetry is a chequered one. His first book, 18 Poems, appeared with Parton Books, but he moved to Dent for the publication of his second, Twenty-five Poems, in 1936, and stayed with them for the rest of his career. In the USA, his publishers were New Directions Press, who brought out The World I Breathe (1939), New Poems (1943), Selected Writings (1946) and In Country Sleep (1952) during his lifetime. The contents and ordering of the UK volumes contained in the centenary Collected Poems (CP14) in Appendix 6 does not contain publication details and these are given below.

A few further observations are in order. First, Thomas very rarely gave titles to his notebook poems, and the poems in 18 Poems, Twenty-five Poems and TML are listed on the contents page in these volumes by their opening line, or a shorted

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