From Publishers Weekly
Published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Welsh poet's death at age 39 in New York, London Times contributor Lycett's new biography has the advantage that Thomas's protective widow, Caitlin, is also recently deceased and his literary estate open. The basic story of the self-styled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," told here with thoroughness and impartiality, still revolves around poetry, penury and pub crawling. Leaving Swansea after grammar school (though returning whenever cash ran short), Thomas spent several aimless years on the periphery of London literary circles before finally making good and eventually becoming a cult figure for American audiences. This public poetic persona ultimately detracted from his poetry more than the assorted side projects in radio, film and lecturing he took on for income. Half a century after Thomas's death, Lycett can be frank about the seamier side of the poet's character, such as his inclination for reading what he called "good fucking books" like Tropic of Cancer, possible drug use and his and Caitlin's extramarital affairs. Thomas's literary reputation, meanwhile, has fluctuated more than his steady popularity, from A Child's Christmas in Wales to "Do not go gentle into that good night." Lycett, who has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming among others, says Dylan fills "the gap between modernism and pop... the written and spoken word... individual and performance art..." and he admires Thomas's lyric gift as an English poet with roots in Wales. Despite its subtitle, Lycett's biography is not so much a new life as a more candid revisiting of the familiar one. 45 b&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In 1933, a prodigiously gifted teenage poet left the provincial Welsh town of Swansea and came up to London to brave the treacherous waters of the literary world. The older, aristocratic Bloomsbury crowd still dominated the scene, together with a younger, rising group of left-leaning Cambridge- and Oxford-educated poets. Dylan Thomas, the son of a remote, alcoholic schoolmaster father and a naive, overprotective mother, had grown up in a household under perpetual financial stress and had gone to work for a Swansea newspaper rather than to a university. By the age of 18, he had already written some of the stunning lyric poetry that within a few years would make him famous -- work that did not fit conveniently into any of the current fashionable movements. At 19 he met the fragile, possessive and immensely seductive Caitlin Macnamara, whom he soon rashly married. It was a tormented union of two needy childlike artists, unable to either separate or provide emotional sustenance for each other -- or even the most basic household comforts for themselves and their children.With little visible means of support for most of his career, Thomas made his unsteady way in the world with the aid of a beautiful voice, the face of a mischievous cherub, a headful of red-gold pre-Raphaelite curls, a talent for self-promotion that masked considerable insecurity, an instinct for how to get taken up by romantically inclined older women and wealthy patrons. But he also had a raging thirst for alcohol that would prove fatal 20 years down the road, when he was at the height of his fame but had essentially ceased writing poetry. His trajectory was that of a shooting star -- a great burst of light in the literary firmament followed by a swift, cataclysmic flameout.Since Chatterton and Shelley, the figure of the poète maudit has had an irresistible allure, not only for the public but for the biographer. For the latter, there is, of course, the promise of good copy; thus the proliferating works about such emblematically self-destructive writers as Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath. Given Thomas's enduring popularity and his riveting declaration, "I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me," it is surprising that Andrew Lycett's biography is the first new one to appear in more than a decade.Thomas drank himself to death, expiring in a Greenwich Village hospital far from home in 1953. It was an era when, believe it or not, literature was still big news, when a charismatic poet like Thomas could fill large halls across America and be mobbed by voraciously enthusiastic fans. Though Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg largely replaced him in the public's imagination, Thomas remained a powerful legend. For years his aura lingered in the dingy corridors of the Chelsea Hotel and in the smoky gloom of the White Horse Tavern, his favorite watering hole during his three tumultuous visits to our country.Like other angel/madmen, Thomas left a lengthy trail of anecdote and gossip behind him -- exactly the kind of material that makes the task of writing a lively biography look deceptively easy. In Thomas's case, the London literary world of the 1930s and 1940s -- full of scandal, vicious infighting, drunken brawls and sexual couplings of all descriptions -- also provides the biographer with more color and shock value than one can find in any issue of Vanity Fair. But in truth, artists like Thomas are extremely challenging subjects, mercurial by nature, full of inconsistencies, riddles even to themselves."Dylan had a clear mission," Lycett writes. "He recognized the conflicting sides to his personality and sought to reconcile them through poetry." ("My enquiry is as to their working," Thomas wrote of the opposing forces within himself, "and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval.") Unfortunately, Lycett, a journalist by trade and the eclectic author of biographies of Moammar Gaddafi, Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling, has neither the deep grounding in poetry nor the empathetic capability to illuminate Thomas's struggle to reconcile the polarities of his nature. Instead he gives us an exhaustively detailed, journalistic account of an incoherent life, leaving it to the reader to grope for a thread. His seeming objectivity extends to an extreme reluctance to either interpret significant information or give it its due emphasis; since no fact or anecdote seems more important than any other, vital points frequently sink into the surrounding bog of more trivial material.As Lycett relentlessly catalogs Thomas's bad behavior -- his obsessive promiscuity, his chronic faithlessness to Caitlin, his epic bouts of drinking, his conscienceless extraction of "loans" from gullible admirers -- he forgets to show us what was worthwhile and heartrending about the man, what made him such a powerfully appealing figure. I suspect Lycett came to develop an unacknowledged distaste for his subject, only giving himself away near the end of this book with one contemptuous phrase describing the exhausted, sinking Thomas as "a sniveling wreck." The great American poet Elizabeth Bishop had some memorable encounters with Thomas when he visited Washington in 1950, when she was poet in residence at the Library of Congress. A close friend of Robert Lowell's and Marianne Moore's and a woman who struggled with her own demons, she understood what it took to overcome tremendous self-doubt and write a dangerous kind of poetry: "just a straight conduit between birth & death . . . with not much space for living along the way." She recognized Thomas's "amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation." To Pearl Kazin, one of the last women in Thomas's life, Bishop wrote: "I have met few people in my life I felt such an instantaneous sympathy and pity for, and although there must have been many things disastrously wrong, Dylan made most of our contemporaries seem small and disgustingly self-seeking and cautious and hypocritical and cold." It is a pity that this kind of balanced compassion and appreciation eluded Andrew Lycett, despite the reams of assiduously gathered research material he had to work from. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
British biographer Lycett takes just the right tone in this vital and penetrating portrait of the quintessential bad boy poet, the passionately brilliant and fatally boozy Welshman Thomas, by eschewing reverent mythologizing for respectful accuracy. He also employs an incisive wit in masterful understatements that provide the perfect counterbalance to the baroque melodrama of Thomas' fast-burning life and throw the lushness and musicality of Thomas' innovative and potent poetry into high relief. Lycett deftly analyzes Thomas' difficult family life, especially his wife Caitlin's capacity for violent behavior, and chronicles the divide between Thomas' poetic gifts and inability to earn a living in spite of working in radio and film. By age 26 Thomas had written 80 percent of his published poems. Tragically, he was also an alcoholic by 21 and dead at 39. "Poet, revolutionary, and buffoon," Thomas wrote earthy, innovative, soulful, and indelible poems and stories that embody a "quest for universal truth" and a struggle for hope in the newly delivered atomic age, while in life he authored one deplorable (albeit wickedly entertaining) tale of debauchery after another. Lycett's engrossing biography illuminates the paradoxes of Thomas' life and recognizes the "indefinable spark of divinity" that drives his vigorous and transcendent writing. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
An authoritative, fresh, and compelling look at the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas-the first in over ten years. In this riveting new account of the life of one of the most celebrated and contradictory figures of the twentieth century, acclaimed biographer Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around Dylan Thomas. When he died, in New York in 1953, Thomas was only 39 years old, and the myths soon took hold: he became the Keats and the Byron of his generation-the romantic poet who died too young, his potential unfulfilled. Making masterful use of original material from archives and personal papers, Lycett describes the development of the young poet, brings invaluable new insights to Thomas's youthful poetry and the themes that continued to appear in his work, and unearths fascinating details about the poet's many affairs and his tempestuous marriage to his passionate Irish wife, Caitlin. Lycett uses as his overwhelming motif the deeply ambivalent forces in Thomas's life-"I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me"-the forces that allowed him to be a wild boy in public and a private poet of deep sensitivity, that helped him bridge the gap between modernism and pop, between the written and spoken word, between individual and performance art, between the academy and the forum. Throughout, the social and historical context of Thomas's struggles and accomplishments are vividly presented. The result is a poignant yet stirring portrait of the chaos of Thomas's personal life and a welcome reevaluation of the lyricism and experimentalism of his poetry, plays, and short stories.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas -- author of "Under Milkwood, A Child's Christmas In Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and numerous poems and stories -- Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around this extraordinarily talented writer, one of the most celebrated and contradictory literary figures of the twentieth century.

When Dylan Thomas died, in New York in 1953, he was only thirty-nine years old and the myths soon took hold. He became the Keats and the Byron of his generation -- the romantic poet who died too young, his potential unfulfilled. Making masterful use of original material from archives and personal papers, Lycett describes the development of the young poet and brings invaluable new insights to Thomas's early writing and the themes that continued to appear in all he wrote. This major new work unearths fascinating details about the poet's many affairs and about his tempestuous marriage to his passionate Irish wife, Caitlin.

Lycett uses as his overwhelming motif the deeply ambivalent forces in Thomas's life -- "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me" -- that allowed him to be a wild boy in public and a private poet of deep sensitivity -- the forces that helped him bridge the gap between modernism and pop, between the written and spoken word, between individual and performance art, between the academy and the forum. Throughout, the social and historical context of Thomas's struggles and accomplishments are vividly presented.

The result is a poignant yet stirring portrait of the chaos of Thomas's personal life and a welcome re-evaluation of the lyricism and experimentalism of his poetry, plays, and short stories.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Published in England last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Welsh poet's death at age 39 in New York, London Times contributor Lycett's new biography has the advantage that Thomas's protective widow, Caitlin, is also recently deceased and his literary estate open. The basic story of the self-styled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive," told here with thoroughness and impartiality, still revolves around poetry, penury and pub crawling. Leaving Swansea after grammar school (though returning whenever cash ran short), Thomas spent several aimless years on the periphery of London literary circles before finally making good and eventually becoming a cult figure for American audiences. This public poetic persona ultimately detracted from his poetry more than the assorted side projects in radio, film and lecturing he took on for income. Half a century after Thomas's death, Lycett can be frank about the seamier side of the poet's character, such as his inclination for reading what he called "good fucking books" like Tropic of Cancer, possible drug use and his and Caitlin's extramarital affairs. Thomas's literary reputation, meanwhile, has fluctuated more than his steady popularity, from A Child's Christmas in Wales to "Do not go gentle into that good night." Lycett, who has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming among others, says Dylan fills "the gap between modernism and pop... the written and spoken word... individual and performance art..." and he admires Thomas's lyric gift as an English poet with roots in Wales. Despite its subtitle, Lycett's biography is not so much a new life as a more candid revisiting of the familiar one. 45 b&w photos. (June 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Dylan Thomas wrote his first book of poetry by the time he was 20, and within a few years he was renowned in the U.K. not only as a well-paid and celebrated writer but also as a drunkard and a scrounger. After gaining fame for his BBC radio play, Under Milk Wood, Thomas was invited on a tour of the United States, where he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 39. Lycett, biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming, has written a life study of Thomas that incorporates previously unavailable material released after the deaths of the poet's wife and son. Other biographies, such as Constant Fitzgibbons's lasting Life of Dylan Thomas or Paul Ferris's Dylan Thomas: The Biography, have ably recounted the essential details of Thomas's life, but Lycett here provides a wealth of useful detail, bringing the Welsh poet's life story up to date, just in time for and in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death. For all libraries.-Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews