Ralph Maud

A guide-book that looks beyond the sunny beaches to the real Wales of today and yesterday; has eight detailed car tours from the central point of Aberystwyth to sites nearby.

A Week of Day Tours to the Sites in Wales Most Evocative of the National Spirit of the Welsh People

Guide to Welsh Wales

Ralph Maud delves into the mystery of Boas's alleged "translations” of stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate.

Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology

Transmission Difficulties

Dylan Thomas

An authoritative and comprehensive guide to all aspects of photography.

The Notebook Poems 1930-34

Walford Davies

Collected Poems, 1934-1953

Although Dylan Thomas is the one of the most well-known poets of the twentieth century, much of his poetry is considered obscure and difficult, and readers and critics tend to concentrate on those poems that can be most easily understood. Not since the early sixties has there been an attempt to explicate the full corpus of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems. In Where Have the Old Words Got Me? Ralph Maud tackles Thomas's entire work, giving special attention to more difficult and obscure poems. He makes valuable use of Thomas's letters as edited by Paul Ferris in his authoritative Collected Letters volume, bringing the whole man and his work into view.

Explications of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems

Where Have the Old Words Got Me?

Professor Emeritus Ralph Maud, PH.D.

The author demonstrates that "The Kingfishers," as Olson's first long poem, is so crucial to understanding his development that a study of it (along with "The Praises," cut from the same cloth) takes one into every aspect of Olson's early life and thought. Insight into Olson's apprenticeship and purposes has been somewhat blurred because "The Kingfishers" has not been entirely understood.

The Significance of Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers"

What Does Not Change

In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced. To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology. An individual who rarely traveled, this major American poet explored the world and its history as well as the furthest reaches of the thought of his day through books. Maud builds upon George Butterick’s annotated listing of Olson’s library, bought by the University of Connecticut after the poet’s death in 1970. The present volume, however, adds categories of books Butterick deliberately omitted: Olson’s childhood books and poetry by his own contemporaries. Linking Olson’s books to his intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career, Maud reveals such little-known but important connections as the contracted book project "Operation Red, White and Black" and Olson’s plan for the long poem "West"—two unrealized projects much later shaped into The Maximus Poems. Maud also outlines the surprisingly multiple role of the painter Corrado Cagli, who brought home to Olson the significance of the Holocaust and introduced him both to the Tarot and to the theories of non-Euclidean geometry that Olson variously incorporated into his poems and essays. In discussing Olson’s relationship to Ezra Pound, Maud defines in some detail what Olson gained from Pound and what he repudiated. Maud refutes the notion that Olson’s intellectual and creative powers declined during the last years of his life, demonstrating that during these years Olson developed his Jungian interest, his attention to early Greek thought, and a new concern for Northern mythology. This chronicle of Olson’s reading from childhood to deathbed constitutes a critical biography of the larger-than-life author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. No modern poet is more revealed in his sources than Olson. Maud’s comprehensive and complete study provides a basis for new and fresh modes of thinking about Olson’s great achievement.

Ralph Maud

About

Books

Join the club