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Dylan Thomas: Last Poems
March 2 through 7, 2010
Vernon Watkins (1906–1967)
Photograph of Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin Macnamara, undated
Bequest of Edwin V. Erbe, Jr., 2007; MA 7172.1 |
The Morgan Library & Museum has a small but significant collection of manuscripts, letters, and books by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953). A selection of this material will be on display during Wales Week, from March 2 through March 7. The exhibition includes a characteristically playful and flirtatious letter from Dylan Thomas to Ellen Kay, a 22-year old aspiring poet with whom Thomas was enamored. Writing after she had failed to show up for an assignation at his favorite London pub, Thomas told her that he drank "limitless pints of liverish liquorice unlibidinous Guinness" to console himself. He warned her jokingly that if she failed to meet him next time he would "cut my throat on a rusty poem."
The manuscript drafts of Thomas's poetry in the Morgan's collection all date from the final two years of his life, and include a working draft of "Elegy." This poem about his father, who died in 1952, is the last poem Thomas wrote and it remained incomplete at the time of his death. Shortly before his sudden collapse at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Thomas gave the manuscript to his close friend and fellow poet Ruthven Todd. It was subsequently completed by his friend Vernon Watkins and published posthumously.
Two of Thomas's working drafts for the poem "Lament" will also be on view. He referred to "Lament" as a "rough and violent" poem when he promised it to Marguerite Caetani. He described its difficult genesis in a letter to Caetani (20 March 1951), and assured her that "the poem will come: the crotchety poem not quite clean, but worked at, between the willies, very hard." Caetani published "Lament" in her journal Bottegh Oscure alongside what became his best-known poem "Do not go gentle into that good night."
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