Beschreibung:

THOMAS, Dylan. I8 Poems , London, the Fortune Press, [1942], 8°, second edition, later issue, PRESENTATION COPY, front blank inscribed "John Arlott from Dylan Thomas 1945, eleven, I think, years after," original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust-jacket. [Rolph B2] John Arlott worked with Dylan Thomas "some twenty or thirty times a year from 1945 to 1950, on literary programmes of every type," describing the poet as "the perfect touchstone for a producer." In his obituary of the poet, published in The Spectator on 13 November, 1953 (p. 534), he wrote: "His poetry was a contribution to the main stream of English poetry not yet generally appreciated to its full worth. His reading of poetry, particularly his own, and especially through the medium of the wireless, made every line he wrote fully intellegible .... He was, as we used mockingly to describe ourselves, 'of the class of 1914', so that he died short of his fortieth birthday. He had brought out, by present-day publishing standards, only a small body of work, eight books ... the real body of his work lies in his four books of poems 18 Poems , sold outright to a publisher for a few shillings in 1934, Twenty-Five Poems in 1936, The Map of Love -- part poetry, part prose -- in 1939, and his best poems, in Deaths and Entrances , in 1946 .... He was an essentially simple person. He liked cricket, Rugby football and beer, jokes, idleness and other men's poetry. Generous but not extravagant, he was sadly harried by demands for income tax which he never really understood and which in the end drove him near to desperation -- without ever penetrating his contempt deeply enough to reach his hate. Yet, even when eighty per cent. of the first pound of his earnings went to the Inland Revenue, he would never debase for a moment the writing which was the nearest matter in the world to his heart .... He wrote a considerable documentary film -- with perhaps the finest commentary ever written for a film in the English language. Thereafter he turned for income largely to light feature films which did not carry his name, the highly-paid American poetry market, and, in England, to broadcasting ... He was, in his own word, 'easy' -- 'And walked abroad in a shower of all my days, High tide and the heron dived when I took the road.' He hated hypocrites and those who sided with the machine: but, in the last analysis, he would tolerate all but those who were unkind."