The Early Notebooks and other Manuscript Verse

Abstract

Dylan Thomas’s earliest poetry includes the verse written up to the age of sixteen, some of which was published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, and some written in collaboration with Daniel Jones. Much is derivative, but from the beginning there is a vein of humorous and light verse. Undoubtedly of greatest interest is the material written between 1930 and 1934, including poems in the four Notebooks, invaluable survivors of what Dylan Thomas later referred to as ‘about 10 exercise-books full of poems’¹ — it seems no notebook has survived for the period July 1932–February 1933; and also some British Museum typescripts. The four Notebooks contain poems Thomas wrote between the ages of fifteen and nineteen and are published in Ralph Maud’s Poet in the Making. It was a period of energetic and fertile poetic activity, and Thomas drew on these sources throughout the thirties. As late as July 1938 he wrote to Henry Treece, ‘I have a great deal of material still, in MSS books, to shape into proper poems’,² and clearly Thomas came to think of the verse in those ordinary exercise books as first drafts of poems, for they provided early manuscript versions of such work as ‘After the funeral’ (1938) and ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ (1941).