Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Preface

1. ‘Begin at the beginning’: introductory

2. ‘The sideboard fruit, the ferns’: the poet in suburbia

3. ‘The loud hill of Wales’: the Welshness of the work

4. ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by’: aspects of the prose

5. ‘Now my saying shall be my undoing’: the need to change

6. ‘Criss-cross rhythms’: comparisons of earlier and later poems

7. ‘Ann’s bard on a raised hearth’: towards ‘After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’

8. ‘Mostly bare I would lie down’: a creative decade ends in war

9. ‘Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood’; ‘This unbelievable lack of wires’: wartime, film work, broadcasts

10. ‘We hid our fears in that murdering breath’: the war elegies

11. ‘Parables of sun light’: towards ‘Poem in October’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and beyond

12. ‘Is my voice being your eyes?’: Under Milk Wood

13. ‘The rhymer in the long tongued room’: writing places and the place of the poet

14. ‘As I sail out to die’: the late poems

15. ‘The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend’: the legend and the man

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index