Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Lives of the Poets
By Robert Craft
The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas
edited by Paul Ferris
Macmillan, 982 pp., $45.00
Journals 1939–1983
by Stephen Spender, edited by John Goldsmith
Random House, 510 pp., $19.95
Night and Day
edited and with an introduction by Christopher Hawtree, preface by Graham Greene
Chatto and Windus (distributed by Merrimack), 278 pp., $22.95
The sheer bulk of the book comes as a surprise, so few of Thomas's letters having been published in the thirty-three years since his death, and his life seeming to have allowed so little time for writing them. Was he wasting his talents, at any rate in the long and carefully composed one-way conversations with friends? Paul Ferris, Thomas's sympathetic editor, thinks that the revised, corrected, and painstakingly copied-out money-grubbing letters, a principal category, eventually became a literary end, replacing the writing of poems and stories. Since drafts of other correspondence survive as well, perhaps we should simply accept Thomas's explanation, in a note denying he has a 'theory of poetry,' that 'I like to write letters.' He shows it here by going out of his and relevance's way to work one of his better puns: 'genius so often being the infinite capacity for aching pains.' Who said anything about genius?
Review, 3511 words
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