One-Track Mind: From Notebook Poems to 18 Poems

Abstract

Recalling Thomas’s prodigious metrical proficiency and ability to turn out superior light verse, way above the standard of the school magazine the two of them edited, Percy Smart also recalled his other, private poetic life: ‘he was at the same time writing much more advanced poetry that we couldn’t have printed in the magazine; no-one would have understood it’.¹ These were the ‘notebook poems’, entered into school exercise books between April 1930 and April 1934, initially for his own eyes only as he cultivated an utterly unique poetic style.² And not just a style, the actual poems drafted or written in this period would comprise the bulk of the Collected Poems Thomas brought out the year before his death: ‘three-quarters of his work as a poet dates in style, in concept and of ten in composiion from this Swansea period’, as Constantine Fitzgibbon has said.³ Though he sold the notebooks in 1941, effectively renouncing them as a resource for future publications, at least two of the poems in the volume Deaths and Entrances that he published in 1945 — ‘The hunchback in the park’ and ‘On the Marriage of a Virgin’ — began their lives as notebook poems.

Doth not man die even in his birth?

— John Donne, Sermon XII