A new and completely revised 60-volume edition of the Dictionary of National Biography has recently been published by Oxford University Press. If you don't happen to have $11,000 burning a hole in your pocket (or, like me, have a munificent university library) then you can subscribe to the daily life, which is sent to you by email. They tend to pick fairly well-known examples: today's is Dylan Thomas:
"In wider terms Thomas's popular reputation has continued to grow, even if critics have not always been kind. Some had already found his work too florid by the time of his death, and the British Movement poets (Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and others) began a dismissive tendency that has persisted among those who prefer their poetry served cold. Paradoxically, it is Thomas's rhetoric and romanticism that appeal so widely to the non-specialist reader, and his more accessible poems are widely anthologized. His position in the English tradition seems secure; Donne, Blake, and Yeats are among the precursors cited, with reservations. His own wry assessment—using a metaphor from cricket, the only game that interested him—that he was ‘top of the second eleven’ (Fitzgibbon, 49) may be near the truth."
Posted by Alan Allport at October 27, 2004 06:51 AM