To the Trees and the Stones

Dylan Thomas is a young English poet whose work produced excited cries from young American poets..’ —The Nation, September 18, 1943 ‘Thomas has the bardic consciousness: he writes a personal lyric in which the sense of his own history and name is surrounded by strange lights and glooms, and if his poems are often obscure, it is that they obey nocturnal laws. His poetry exists in a world in which the sexual forces of nature, the shifting tides and currents for which the individual cannot fully account but to which the passion of his being is finally responsible, override the merely personal clamor.’ —The Nation, May 2, 1953 ‘It need no longer be eccentric to claim that Thomas is the greatest living poet in the English language.’—Philip Toynbee (The Nation, May 2, 1953)