Long-Lost Dylan Thomas Poetry Notebook Discovered in a Drawer

At the Guardian, Mark Brown reports on a previously lost notebook belonging to Dylan Thomas, now recovered after 70 years of hiding in a Tesco paper bag at the bottom of a desk drawer. "The notebook was the fifth used for poems by Thomas – the other four are held by the State University of New York at Buffalo. They have been 'the holy grail of Thomas scholars up until now,' said [John] Goodby, a professor at Swansea university and editor of the centenary edition of Thomas’s Collected Poems." Of course such a find is going to auction for a boatload:

It's now due to fetch an estimate of £100,000-£150,000 ($157,095-235,700) at auction and is said to shed some light on Thomas's unsteady relationship with his mother-in-law. The notebook, an old school exercise book, contains 19 handwritten poems that Thomas, then in his early 20s, wrote between 1934-35. All of them went on to be published, though not always as he originally drafted them and there are numerous crossings out, doodles and revisions. It was taken by its owners to Sotheby’s, whose experts were somewhat astonished, according to manuscripts specialist Gabriel Heaton. "It is very exciting. It is completely unknown to scholars, to researchers, to everyone."

The details on this astonishing find:

The notebook can be roughly dated as Thomas finished his fourth notebook on 30 April 1934 and the first poem in this notebook is All All and All the Dry Worlds Lever – a poem that, on 20 July, he sent to his lover Pamela Hansford Johnson.

All All and All is written as it was published but other poems have considerable amendments and crossings out with Altarwise by Owl-light the most heavily revised, a reflection probably of its intricacy. For example, Thomas’s original third line was, the notebook reveals, “Clutching the hang-nail and the shafted arm”. That has been crossed out and replaced with “Abaddon in the hang-nail cracked from Adam”.

Brown also notes Thomas's composition/editing style:

The notebooks were essential to Thomas because he used them to quarry for poems he wanted published. Also in the notebook are: I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking; I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain; Now/Say nay/Man dry man; Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s mouth; Incarnate devil in a talking snake; and Foster the light, nor veil the manshaped moon.

It will never be known if [mother-in-law] Yvonne Macnamara asked for the notebook to be burned because of animus towards Thomas, or simply because she thought it was rubbish.

Read the full report at The Guardian.