When Leslie Norris, poet and storywriter, read Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill" at the unveiling of the memorial to Thomas in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey on 1 March 1982, his gentle, mellifluous Welsh voice bore a strong resemblance to Thomas's own. The sounds, the techniques, even the scenery of the poem were familiar and comfortable to Norris, seven years Thomas's junior, an early imitator of him, and briefly, an acquaintance.

At the time of Dylan Thomas's death in 1953 at the age of thirty-nine, Norris was still ten years away from beginning his own mature career, one that would bring him only in his forties and fifties some of the growing attention in England and America that Thomas had enjoyed from his early twenties. Even when Norris's late recognition came, it was initially not so much from literary "establishments" as from younger poets and editors, attracted (perhaps mistakenly) to the seeming...