Three Manuscript Drafts Corrections by Thomas Dylan (1 results)

An exceptionally well-preserved set of drafts for Thomas's characteristically sardonic poem. Written during a period of intense creativity in the 1930s, the manuscripts offer important insight into the erratic poet's creative process. Partly due to his chaotic existence, original manuscripts of Thomas's poems are rare. In the 1930s, Thomas's writing methods were, like the man, volatile and disorderly. In February 1935, he described the "mess" of his drafts in a letter to Charles Fisher: "I write a poem on innumerable sheets of scrap paper, write it on both sides of the paper, often upside down and criss cross ways unpunctuated, surrounded by drawings of lamp posts and boiled eggs, in a very dirty mess; bit by bit I copy out the slowly developing poem into an exercise book; and, when it is completed, I type it out. The scrap sheets I burn". The present poem seems to be one of a rare few saved from the flames. "To Others Than You" was composed at "old, lost Laugharne" in Carmarthenshire in June 1939. That month, Thomas sent the "new short poem" to his friend Vernon Watkins, with whom he "kept up a regular exchange of ideas and poems" (Lycett, p. 175) and who became godfather to Thomas's son, Llewelyn, in May. In the poem, Thomas reflects on his unhappy experiences in London and the duplicitous people he met there. He wrote to Watkins: "The word I used too much - 'sucked' - is here bound, I think, to be. 'Desireless familiar' is a phrase in my 'Orchards' & what caused me to write the poem. The best thing is, as you'll perhaps agree, the simple last line of the middle bit" (Letters, p. 383). One of the poem's lines, "My friends were enemies on stilts", has its origins in a phrase in an April 1933 poem recorded in one of his notebooks, "A friend is but an enemy on stilts" (Maud, p. 186). In the present drafts, the work is simply titled "Poem"; when Thomas sent it to Watkins, it had its familiar title, "To Others Than You", which, given there is no record of his sending the poem to anyone else, could be taken as excluding Watkins from the accusations in the poem. "To Others Than You" was published in the autumn 1939 issue of Seven magazine and collected in New Poems (1943) and Deaths and Entrances (1946). Paul Ferris, ed., Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, 1985; Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, 2003; Ralph Maud, The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, 1967. Three sheets (195 x 124 mm), handwritten in blue ink on one side only, located and dated "Laugharne, June 5 1939". Housed in a green quarter morocco solander box with chemise by the Chelsea Bindery. A couple of marginal rust marks, overall excellent condition.