This edition of Dylan Thomas's poetry contains all of the poems which he himself wished to preserve. The poet made the selection in 1952, the year before his death, and wrote esprcially for it the beautiful "Author's Prologue", addressed to "my readers, the strangers".
In 1956, the collection was augmented by the addition of the poem "Elegy", for which sixty pages of manuscript lines and notes were found in Thomas's papers after his death, and which was edited by his friend, the poet Vernon Watkins:
"Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind of man brave in his narrow pride"
These lines were written in memory of the poet's father, but they speak to us also, in image and feeling, of Dylan Thomas himself.