Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Dylan Thomas’s list of Robert Browning poems is found on back of an envelope

An enigmatic list of 12 Browning poems – scrawled by the Welsh poet on the back of an unsent envelope addressed to Osbert Sitwell – has been discovered by a rare book dealers

Dylan Thomas's unsent envelope addressed to Osbert Sitwell
Dylan Thomas’s unsent envelope addressed to Osbert Sitwell. Photograph: Peter Harrington
It’s the back-of-an-envelope jotting of a mighty literary mind: a mysterious envelope on which Dylan Thomas has scrawled a list of poems by Robert Browning has come to light at a rare book dealers.

Dated to after 1943, the envelope has been addressed by Thomas to Osbert Sitwell – writer and brother of Edith – but is unstamped, and was never sent. Instead, on the back, Thomas has written an enigmatic list of 12 Browning poems, and then set it aside. Today, it is scuffed, dirty, “and has even been trodden on”, said Adam Blakeney at Peter Harrington book dealers, who stumbled upon it in an auction
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