Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1194303 in Books
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Welsh poet's death at age 39 in New York, London Times contributor Lycett's new biography has the advantage that Thomas's protective widow, Caitlin, is also recently deceased and his literary estate open. The basic story of the self-styled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," told here with thoroughness and impartiality, still revolves around poetry, penury and pub crawling. Leaving Swansea after grammar school (though returning whenever cash ran short), Thomas spent several aimless years on the periphery of London literary circles before finally making good and eventually becoming a cult figure for American audiences. This public poetic persona ultimately detracted from his poetry more than the assorted side projects in radio, film and lecturing he took on for income. Half a century after Thomas's death, Lycett can be frank about the seamier side of the poet's character, such as his inclination for reading what he called "good fucking books" like Tropic of Cancer, possible drug use and his and Caitlin's extramarital affairs. Thomas's literary reputation, meanwhile, has fluctuated more than his steady popularity, from A Child's Christmas in Wales to "Do not go gentle into that good night." Lycett, who has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming among others, says Dylan fills "the gap between modernism and pop... the written and spoken word... individual and performance art..." and he admires Thomas's lyric gift as an English poet with roots in Wales. Despite its subtitle, Lycett's biography is not so much a new life as a more candid revisiting of the familiar one. 45 b&w photos.
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From Booklist
British biographer Lycett takes just the right tone in this vital and penetrating portrait of the quintessential bad boy poet, the passionately brilliant and fatally boozy Welshman Thomas, by eschewing reverent mythologizing for respectful accuracy. He also employs an incisive wit in masterful understatements that provide the perfect counterbalance to the baroque melodrama of Thomas' fast-burning life and throw the lushness and musicality of Thomas' innovative and potent poetry into high relief. Lycett deftly analyzes Thomas' difficult family life, especially his wife Caitlin's capacity for violent behavior, and chronicles the divide between Thomas' poetic gifts and inability to earn a living in spite of working in radio and film. By age 26 Thomas had written 80 percent of his published poems. Tragically, he was also an alcoholic by 21 and dead at 39. "Poet, revolutionary, and buffoon," Thomas wrote earthy, innovative, soulful, and indelible poems and stories that embody a "quest for universal truth" and a struggle for hope in the newly delivered atomic age, while in life he authored one deplorable (albeit wickedly entertaining) tale of debauchery after another. Lycett's engrossing biography illuminates the paradoxes of Thomas' life and recognizes the "indefinable spark of divinity" that drives his vigorous and transcendent writing. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A chilling and captivating tale
It is late. I am tired, but I have just finished a compelling book on a deeply compelling and tragic man. Dylan Thomas burned bright and fast, and this tale of drunken excess and amazing talent could have read like an exteneded episode of E! True Hollywood Story. It is the beauty of the words that raises Thomas's life up so high, the twisting of phrases, the power of poetry. This book made me want to throw my television off the balcony and embrace the world. Thomas was damaged goods, but at least he tried to live life to the full. He did more in less than 40 years than most writers do in a lifetime. A great biography.

A work of substance & solid scholarship
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This was the first poem by Dylan Thomas I read while in college, and its words haunt me still. This poem, and others such as "Fern Hill," "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "Poem on His Birthday," "I See the Boys of Summer," and "Over Sir John's Hill" established him as the epitome of romanticism and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas, "the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," was born on Oct. 27, 1914, in Swansea, Wales. He died of pneumonia and acute alcoholic poisoning in New York City, during his fourth lecture tour in the United States, on Nov. 9, 1953. His final resting place, marked by a simple white cross, is in St. Martin's churchyard, Laugharne, in West Wales.

Andrew Lycett's Dylan Thomas: A New Life was published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the poet's death. Lycett, a regular contributor to the Times (London), has written a thorough, astonishingly detailed study of Thomas' life. A cynic might describe this exhaustive biography as exhausting, for one needs patience and perseverance to wade through its intricate details.

Nevertheless, at the end, one is glad to have read this highly informative and scholarly work. One marvels at the amount of research needed to create such a sustained narrative.

As I read Lycett's work, the image of the prodigal son often rose to mind: the story of an irresponsible young man who "wasted his substance in riotous living." Much of the book is a sad chronicle of Dylan's marathon pub crawling, multiple fornications, and shameless sponging off his friends.

Dylan once revealed his personality in a nutshell: "One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women."

To put it bluntly: Dylan Thomas chased anything and everything in skirts (the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks ... concerning his protestations of disinclination toward homosexuality). A pitiful alcoholic, he often drank his breakfast, lunch, and supper. He was forever cadging from his friends, "borrowing" the "loans" that he had no intention of repaying.

In a classic statement of his professional purpose, Dylan wrote: "I have a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression."

Lycett describes Dylan Thomas as "this oddly religious man who lived outside any formal creed," and who, "caught between Muse [poetry] and Mermaid [a tavern], wrote of "the absurdity of life in the midst of mortality, and of the inevitability of death. [Dylan wrote] of the relativism of a world where good and bad are 'two ways / Of moving about your death.' He was not the first poet to see the indifferent universe . . . Shakespeare anticipated him by over four centuries. But Dylan gave this philosophy a modern existentialist perspective."

The great mystery, then, surrounding Dylan Thomas is this supreme contradiction: How could a wastrel who lived like the devil write with the pen of an angel? What heavenly muse inspired this secular humanist to compose poetry of transcendent beauty and sacred spirituality? The paradox is puzzling; strange and inexplicable are the ways of genius.

Lycett reveals the dark side of Dylan's tumultuous marriage to Caitlin Macnamara; the birth of their three children--Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm Garan; and of Caitlin's decision to have four abortions.

Lycett also cites a comment that Nelson Algren made concerning Dylan: "You have to feel a certain desperation about everything either to write like that or to drink like that." Indeed, the story of Dylan Thomas is that of a man who lived a life of unquiet desperation. Some of his friends believed that this 40-a-day-man (two packs of cigarettes) drank his way into the grave because he had an overpowering death wish. Dylan Thomas had gazed into the abyss and had been horrified.

In the midst of a distressingly mediocre pop culture, Andrew Lycett, in Dylan Thomas: A New Life, offers a volume of depth and dignity, of scholarship and substance--an antidote to the mindless drivel of our time. The book contains 64 black-and-white photos.