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“... bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from ...”

“... contemporaries, a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on ...”

“... his own election that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way ...”

“... working hard on my old verses (after all, he reminded me, Arabs have produced good translations of Dylan Thomas and James Joyce) and was put out when I rejected them and gave him the new simplistic piece: but I was determined to ‘make my position clear’, so that no one thought me to represent some devious British foreign policy (if such there ...”

“... own idiom. Alan’s stiff upper lip collapsed. What, he wondered, could possibly he worse? Well, Dylan Thomas, of course. The bibulous Welsh poet, already squandering his talent as prodigally as other people’s money, became Margaret’s next obsession. Thomas was the cad to end all cads, the cadger to end all ...”

“... just how much knowledge is limited by national boundaries. The Macmillan has a nice photograph of Dylan Thomas but does not say why anybody should bother to read him, only that he died of drink. Longman by contrast gives a carefully-worded appreciation, taken from Columbia. Macmillan says that St Thomas Aquinas is one ...”

“... by love, as in Romans 6:9 where death ‘hath no more dominion’, a tyrant deposed by Christ. Dylan Thomas made a poem from this bit of scripture, joined to the hope that ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not’ – a secular prayer also given expression in Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Among extinction’s consolations, the fiction of the ...”

“... the self is the health of the self exchanged.A series of poetic dramas – about the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, about Satan’s attempt to father a child, about the personification of Chelmsford – offer opaque allegories of experience, in a form closer to morality play than provincial rep. In book after book, he celebrated a mystical vision of the world ...”

“... be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.’ As an optical metaphor, ‘paralaxis’ has huge potential for the poet interested in the ...”

“... write when a public occasion required a poetical response. Whether the occasion was the death of Dylan Thomas or the 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not by nature a ...”

“... Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of ...”

“... the country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and ...”

“... left school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories and poems to bring in cash. She met Dylan Thomas after their work appeared in the same paper: ‘He had won a prize for a poem … I knew it was derivative and I knew from what.’ They were briefly engaged, and she and her mother visited his family in Wales. She remembers someone remarking on ...”

“... band on the planet. A notable if unsurprising absence from the Vote for Change parade is Bob Dylan, who was misquoted by Jimmy Carter when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1976, and who hasn’t said a straight word about politics for forty years. In a recent interview in the Sunday Telegraph, Dylan said he ...”

“... to give a junior colleague a leg-up is surpassed only by that of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas Pynchon. There’s clearly a connection between reclusiveness and readiness to puff, even if Rushdie’s withdrawal from the public eye was neither voluntary nor permanent. Maybe it’s simply a question of having plenty of time on one’s hands. Or ...”