Liberating Dylan Thomas

‘Rhian Barfoot’s ground-breaking study is a timely reminder of the burning relevance of Dylan Thomas, both to a fuller understanding of Anglo-Welsh and British twentieth-century poetry, and to literary studies more generally. Barfoot is the first scholar to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on Thomas’s early poetry in a way that does not reduce it to social or personal pathology, and the result is a series of brilliantly insightful readings that do justice to its serious play; the reading of ‘To-day, this insect’, for example, is the best I have ever read. By scrupulously attending to the interaction of mind and language, Barfoot’s account reveals the inner workings of Thomas’s ‘revolution of the word’ and marks an important step towards understanding how Thomas’s ‘intricate images’ truly work, to liberate both the reader and Thomas himself.’
–John Goodby, Editor of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas