Collected Poems

Abstract

The last poems include the seven new poems in Collected Poems (1952), major contributions, complex in their craftsmanship and metaphoric richness yet resonant and enduring in their poetic appeal, and the two unfinished poems in manuscript ‘In Country Heaven’ and ‘Elegy’ included in Collected Poems 1934–53 (1988). Like all Thomas’s later, and finest work, the last poems were slowly composed, partly because of their meticulous structure and partly because their passionate artifice envisioned the linked and increasing eschatological themes of his later work. Contrary to the falsifying myth of some critics and biographers who show little understanding of Thomas’s poetic aim and achievement, they show, not a diminution of inspiration in these last years but new and confident directions.