ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE AND OTHER STORIES (275 pp.) — DylanThomas —New Directions ($3.50).
SEVEN LETTERS TO OSCAR WILLIAMS (13 pp.) — Dylan Thomas — in New World Writing #7 — New American Library (50¢)
Modern poetry often seems a pretty dreary cocktail party. In a quiet corner, of course, perches the aged eagle, T. S. Eliot, 66, still far and away the No. 1 living poet of the 20th century, sipping his extra-dry sherry of resignation. His old white magic still works, but it no longer holds any surprises. Eliot's lesser poetic cousins—Auden, Spender, Stevens—sip the highballs that somehow fail to intoxicate, that are diluted by too much intellectual ice. There are such grand old but long-familiar individualists as Martini-clever e. e. cummings (with lemon peel) and hard-cider-happy Robert Frost. The younger men frantically mix their drinks, from opaque Bloody Marys to phony-bucolic applejack. Mostly they are reduced to talking to each other.
But one strikingly different figure dominates the whole party: a thick little man, in a dirty, rumpled suit, with tousled hair on a bulging gnome's head, who is swigging boilermakers. He is also roaring out stories, laughing, pinching the girls, charming all who push into range of his eloquence.
For 18 months the picture of this guest has existed only in memory, for Dylan Thomas died in Manhattan in the fall of 1953, at 39. But he is still the life of the party.
The Return of Joy. His 90 poems, collected in a single volume in 1953, have gone through a spectacular seven printings. Records of his booming readings have become bestsellers (TIME, May 2). Now more scraps of Thomas' vivid prose have been put together and issued in a single volume called Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories, and his letters are finding their way into print. Dylan Thomas is more alive today than any living poet now writing verse.
The reasons are not hard to find. Thomas returned to poetry what people used to expect of it: joy. His work was sometimes tortured and anguished. It could be obscure—not obscure in a deliberate, cultish manner, but in the sense that an excess of color can produce darkness. But far the larger part of his verse is ebullient, drenched with sight and sound, rich in haunting new language fed from old and sparkling springs.
There is another reason for Dylan Thomas' soaring popularity. Not only his verse but his life fitted in with what people always secretly expect of poets. It was boisterous, dissolute, sometimes repellent, often appealing, both tragic and gay: a mixture easily labeled "romantic." As much as his work, his life—and death —contributed to the burgeoning Dylan Thomas legend.