In 1977, Roland Barthes announced the death of the author in a celebrated essay of the same name. Those who feel that it is high time that his work deserves to be read at a healthier distance from the force-field of his life than is now generally the case could be forgiven for feeling that there is, perhaps, no twentieth-century author who could have benefitted more from such a death than Dylan Thomas, whose actual demise in a New York hospital in November 1953 at the age of thirty-nine – from medical malpractice, not alcoholic ‘insult to the brain’, as legend still has it – set the seal on a popular reputation, which remains high to this day, buoyed as it is by a fascination with an exuberant life and seemingly exemplary bohemian dissolution. Almost all of Thomas's work is in print over half a century later, and his status as a cultural icon, burnished to a high gleam during the 1960s, has diminished only a little since its heyday. Yet this popular reputation is almost wholly at odds with the one that Thomas enjoys among academics, critics, literary historians and literary journalists.

Thomas was – with W. H. Auden – one of two outstanding poets to emerge in Britain during the 1930s. He became the most influential young poet of the 1940s and was the last British poet to have an impact on both American and world poetry. For twenty years after his death, he was regarded as, if not a ‘major’ poet in the league of Eliot, Yeats, Stevens and Pound, then certainly an important one in the tier below this exalted rank. Yet despite the evident magnificence of his most celebrated poetry, since the mid-1970s, critics have largely avoided any prolonged engagement with it.

With a growing awareness of the significant and unique achievements of their own poetry, especially of the post-war period, critics from the United States (US) understandably grew less interested in a poet whose impact – however sympathetically registered at the time – could be viewed as a final manifestation of the deference of the American literary world to that of Britain.