Admirers of the work of Sylvia Plath will welcome this new paperback edition of a study, first published by The Athlone Press in 1976, which provides coherent and persuasive readings of her poetry. Drawing upon the traditional skills of the literary critic, David Holbrook also deploys the illumination of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology in a pioneering work of literary, individual and cultural interpretation.

Mr Holbrook here offers a new interpretation of Dylan Thomas which seeks, by uncovering the roots of his predicament as man and artist, to show what is of lasting value in his achievement. This undertaking involves the consideration of some profound questions of human personality and of human creativity and its denial.