Dylan the Bard

Dylan Thomas was the best lyric poet of his age, who, by his life as well as his work, brought a new mass audience to his craft. A writer of rare and wonderful gifts, capable of producing some of the most beautiful lines in the language, Dylan was also capable of consuming devastating amounts of alcohol. Dylan the Bard explores how and why this enormously talented writer, torn between a search for personal peace and international notoriety, was slowly defeated by his own self-destructive nature.Mining new material, including personal letters from the poet himself and recently discovered photographs, Andrew Sinclair casts new light on the life, work and death of Dylan. He examines the divisions and tensions of Dylan's Welsh working-class heritage and puritanical English upbringing, and offers fresh, compelling insight into the relation between Dylan's poetry and his life. From Dylan's dream of Wales, to the brawling and boozing in Fitzrovia in the thirties and forties, to the American lecture tour that finally killed him in the early fifties, Dylan the Bardis the tragic and exuberant story of a cult figure in his own time and a poet for all time.