Dylan Thomas is as much remembered for his persona--the fiery young romantic with the Welsh brogue--as for his poetry. The work of Thomas has occasioned much critical commentary, although critics share no consensus on how bright his star shines in the galaxy of modern poetry. In fact, it is a curious phenomenon that so many critics seem obsessed with deciding once and for all whether Thomas's poems belong side by side with those of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, or whether they are--in the words of a reputable critic quoted by Henry Treece in Dylan Thomas: "Dog among the Fairies"--"intellectual fakes of the highest class." The latter is definitely a minority opinion; yet even Treece, an acquaintance of Thomas's, had to admit that the poet's work is "extremely ill-balanced."

The estimation of the work has often been colored by an estimation of the man...