The first thing that may occur to one, upon learning of the imminent appearance of a nearly thousand-page edition of the complete available letters of Dylan Thomas, is that there is hardly an aching need for such a compilation. Who, after all, in this world full of good books that most of us will never get around to reading, is really clamoring for an exhaustive account of the life and times of this archetypal postwar “celebrity” poet? Hasn’t the story of his bibulous Anglo-American misadventures already become too stale and ubiquitous a legend? Isn’t it about time that his verse stopped taking a back seat to his turbulent personality? Shouldn’t we be beginning, at last, to attempt to make a sensible judgment as to the real value of his contribution to poetry in our time?

Well, yes. But to commence reading The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas is, nonetheless, to become hopelessly hooked.¹ From the outset, the reader of this impressive volume—whose editor, Paul Ferris, has written the finest extant biography, Dylan Thomas (1977)—is in the intimate company of a fascinating human being, unmistakably the Dylan Thomas of legend, but at the same time a man far more mesmerizing, exasperating, amusing, and touching than the buffoonish, bigger-than-life media-darling we have all come to think we know. The Dylan Thomas of these letters is vulgar, guileful, manic, terminally immature, eternally obsessed with sex, death, words, and himself, and contemptuous of English professors, women, other poets, and other Welshmen;