Eighteen Poems.

THOMAS, Dylan.

$15,000.00

Item Number: 111544

London: Sunday Referee and the Parton Press, 1936.

First edition, first issue of Thomas’ first book, one of 250 copies. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to Desmond Hawkins, who was Dylan’s literary editor and close friend, with a playful (and perhaps drunken) inscription which attempts to conflate their names, maybe in an effort to create a new single persona out of the two of them: “To and from Hawkins Dylan Desmond Thomas Dylan Desmond Dylan Desmond Hawkins Thomas Dylan Desmond.” He has also included a more conventional inscription, signed “Dylan Thomas 24th May 1936.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some small chips to the extremities. Housed in a custom clamshell box. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

Dylan Thomas is famous for his acutely lyrical and emotional poetry, his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery in his poems. The Eighteen Poems is his first collection of poetry and reveals some of Thomas’s key themes, which he was to return to later in his career: the unity of time, the similarity between creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living things. The book was published by the Sunday Referee, which was a Sunday newspaper in the UK that had launched their ‘Poets Corner’ feature in 1933. On September 3rd 1933 Dylan’s “That Sanity Be Kept” was published and the editor described it as ‘the best modernist poem as yet I have received.’ On October 29th 1933 they also published Dylan’s “The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives the Flower” and called it ‘cosmic in outlook….a large poem, greatly expressed. Dylan became a staple poet of the Referee in 1934 with a further five poems published. It was then decided that the young poet from Wales would receive a poetry award and have a collection sponsored by the newspaper. He chose thirteen poems from his notebook and then he wrote five more in the months that followed. The Referee had difficulty finding a commercial publisher however, but eventually connected with David Archer of the Parton Bookshop who occasionally printed books. David Archer had a desire to help young poets succeed. It was finally published on 18th December 18, 1934 as a joint effort, with The Sunday Referee periodical and the Parton Bookshop, sharing the printing costs. Only 250 copies were bound at the time of publication, making this first work very rare indeed.