Conjestiveheartfailure

I "Notebooks"

Dylan Thomas wrote, and in some cases published in magazines, his first stories between April 1931 and the end of 1933, even before the release of " 18 Poems "would put the attention of the general public as a poet. The last story appeared in 1953, just months before his death. It appears therefore that the prose covers the whole range of poetic production, although it has attracted the attention of critics always so marginal compared to the poems and has been seen as complementary to them, rarely features its own independent value.

Particularly significant are the works of Thomas contained in " Notebooks" on the drafting will be completed in October 1934 when Thomas was only twenty. The first four books, written between April 1930 and April 1934, later collected and published by Ralph Maud in 1967 in the United States, contain more than 200 poems, or three quarters of poetic production of Dylan Thomas. A fifth book is called "Red Notebook ", as cataloged by the Lockwood Memorial Library where today is located at the State University of New York at Buffalo : a notebook from the red cover and pages numbered in pencil by the same Thomas, which contains ten stories, all published in later collections. While the distinction between the four books of poetry and prose of the fifth book demonstrates how Thomas held separate the two activities, the other an analysis of the stories often reveals close similarities with the poems of little earlier. But the importance of the "Notebooks" is also significant from a formal point of view: the additions, deletions, all that is part of a long and painful process of review is typical of Thomas, reveal, through comparison with the published version, the methods and the evolution of his writing, according Donald Tritschler, "the (Red) Notebook Itself Is Most Interesting work as a book" . The works contained in "Notebooks", therefore, not only will be subject to continuous correction and almost obsessive, but Thomas will be the tank that will draw constantly, being the result of which will equal more prolific over the next twenty years.

Suddenly, in 1941, Thomas decided to sell them, pressed by economic needs. The price of this drastic cut with the early work is huge, and so the biographer says Fitzgibbon :

He sold Them to Bertamè Rota, the dealer in rare books and manuscripts, and Eventually They Found Their Way to the Lockwood Memorial Library in Buffalo [...] Those Were His youth notebooks, notebooks Those Were His poems, notebooks Those Were the young poet Dylan [...] That quarry Which Had he created in His own feverish, fertile youth was closed To Him forever. The boy-poet, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive , has Ceased to exist.

Considering also the relatively short span of his life and, consequently, of his literary activity, it is not uncommon to find records in "Notebooks", or references in the numerous letters, which testify to the coexistence, in the design of securities , images, characters, destined to come together now in the poem, now in prose. We do not know if in some cases the same idea has developed into a poem or a story told in an almost completely independent, or whether it was for Thomas a conscious process, however, recognize the existence of these links between poetry and short stories serves to refute the hypothesis that the production of prose should be considered only in light of the poetic and subordinate to it. On the contrary, in relation to it and with equal value in the discovery of the narrative Thomas.