Page "Dylan Thomas" Paragraph 54

Thomas ' work and stature as a poet have been much debated by critics and biographers since his death.

Critical studies have been clouded by Thomas ' personality and mythology, especially his drunken persona and death in New York.

When Seamus Heaney gave an Oxford lecture on the poet he opened by addressing the assembly, " Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry ", querying how ' Thomas the Poet ' is one of his forgotten attributes.

David Holbrook, who has written three books about Thomas, stated in 1962, " the strangest feature of Dylan Thomas's notoriety-not that he is bogus, but that attitudes to poetry attached themselves to him which not only threaten the prestige, effectiveness and accessability to English poetry, but also destroyed his true voice and, at last, him.