THOMAS, Dylan 18 Poems. London [The Favil Press for] The Sunday Referee and The Parton Bookshop. 1934. [with] THOMAS, Dylan. Twenty-Five Poems.

‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’

THOMAS, Dylan 18 Poems. London [The Favil Press for] The Sunday Referee and The Parton Bookshop. 1934. [with] THOMAS, Dylan. Twenty-Five Poems. [Letchworth: Temple Press for] London: J.M. Dent. 1936.

18 Poems: 8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, lacking the dustwrapper; pp. 36, [4]; corners and extremities slightly worn, small chips to three of four corners and head of spine; light spotting to endpapers and half-title, a few isolated marginal spots throughout; a very good copy.

Twenty-Five Poems: 8vo. Original grey boards, sympathetically in pale blue cloth, spine lettered in dark blue in imitation of the original, endpapers and pastedowns renewed, lacking the dust-jacket; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 47, [1]; light rubbing to edges and extremities, a few marks to boards; a very good copy; presentation inscription to Aubrey Douglas-Smith, dated January 1938 to original front flyleaf.

Both volumes housed in an emerald-green, cloth-covered solander box lettered in gilt to front panel.

First edition, first issue of Dylan Thomas’s debut, 18 Poems, together with a second impression of its successor, Twenty-Five Poems, the latter presented by the author to Aubrey Douglas-Smith.

18 Poems, Thomas’s first book, followed a circuitous route to publication. Leaving the Swansea school where his father taught in 1931, aged sixteen — ‘an undistinguished pupil’ (ODNB) — he found work at the local evening newspaper, contributing on literary matters whenever possible. Already writing poems and consciously cultivating the life of a poet (which, for Thomas, invariably involved alcohol), the notebooks he filled between 1930 and 1934 contain a significant proportion of the poems on which his reputation rests.

‘And death shall have no dominion’, his defiantly resonant refusal of mortality, appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933, followed that October by ‘The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ in The Sunday Referee, a poem central to 18 Poems and which encapsulates Thomas’ preoccupation with ‘the pantheistic union of man and nature’ (Christie). Appearing on 29th Oct. 1933, the poem won the annual prize for poetry awarded by the paper, part of which consisted of publication, under the aegis of the Referee, of a book of the winning poet’s work. These early poems had also attracted the attention of T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender, the former considering Thomas for his Faber list. The book was eventually issued jointly by the press at the Parton Bookshop and The Sunday Referee. Run by David Archer – ‘the effete left-leaning scion of a Wiltshire landowner’ (Ferris) – the bookshop at 2 Parton Street, between Southampton Row and Red Lion Square, was a gathering place for young writers and poets, George Barker and David Gascoyne among them.

Although 18 Poems proved both a critical and commercial success, Thomas remained dissatisfied with his publisher. Writing to George Reavey in 1938, he complained that he had ‘lost badly on that book, owing to my ignorance & Archer’s vagueness: I was given, in small irregular sums […], no more than £4 or £5, and have not received a halfpenny royalty although the book, for poetry has sold […] remarkably well.’ Five hundred sets of sheets of the volume were printed, bound in two issues of two hundred and fifty copies; this copy is the first state with flat spine, untrimmed upper and fore-edges and lacking the extra sheet between half title and title page.

By the time Dent ‘t[ook] him by surprise’ (Lycett) by publishing Twenty-Five Poems in 1936, Thomas’s work was selling in greater numbers: the first impression of 750 copies sold quickly and was followed by three further impressions. This copy of the second impression was inscribed by Thomas in 1938 to Aubrey Douglas-Smith (1899–1963), later the author of Guilty Germans? (Left Book Club, 1942; subsequently issued in a Gollancz trade edition). Thomas may have known Douglas-Smith through the Parton Bookshop circle (the shop closed in 1939, a year after the present inscription). The poet’s political sympathies were firmly with the radical left, without, it seems, formally joining any party or group.

Rolph B. 1(a), B. 3. See Christie, Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014); Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography (1999); Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2003); Ferris ed., Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (1985).

SKU: 2124733