Lost Dylan Thomas notebook may cast light on his most impenetrable poems

A previously unknown Dylan Thomas notebook containing drafts and revisions of some of his most challenging poems has emerged more than 70 years after the poet’s mother-in-law asked for it to be burned in the kitchen boiler.

The notebook, lying for decades in a drawer, could shine fresh light on poems that even the most knowledgeable of Thomas scholars find baffling. John Goodby, a leading Dylan Thomas scholar, said it was “the most exciting discovery since his death in 1953”.

The story behind the notebook, which could be worth £150,000, is fascinating too, giving an insight into the tricky relationship Thomas had with Yvonne Macnamara, the mother of his long-suffering wife Caitlin.

The notebook, an old school exercise book, contains 19 handwritten poems that Thomas, then in his early 20s, wrote between 1934-35. All of them went on to be published, though not always as he originally drafted them and there are numerous crossings out, doodles and revisions.

It was taken by its owners to Sotheby’s, whose experts were somewhat astonished, according to manuscripts specialist Gabriel Heaton. “It is very exciting. It is completely unknown to scholars, to researchers, to everyone.”

The notebook has spent most of its life in a Tesco paper bag – included in the sale – languishing in a drawer. Attached to the book was a note: “This Book of Poetry by Dylan Thomas was with a lot of paper given to me to burn in the kitchen boiler. I saved it and forgot all about until I read of his death.”

The note was written by Louie King who was, in the 1930s, in domestic service for Yvonne Macnamara who, presumably, gave the instruction to destroy it.

“The relationship between Thomas and his mother-in-law was not the best,” said Heaton. “It isn’t hard to imagine that he was not an ideal son-in-law.”

Evidence of their relationship is, by coincidence, given in a separately consigned letter also being sold by Sotheby’s. Writing from his mother-in-law’s house in Blashford, Hampshire, Thomas tells a friend: “This flat English country levels the intelligence, planes down the imagination, narrows the a’s, my ears belch old wax and misremembered passages of misunderstood music, I sit and hate my mother-in-law, glowering at her from corners and grumbling about her in the sad, sticky, quiet of the lavatory …”

The notebook was the fifth used for poems by Thomas – the other four are held by the State University of New York at Buffalo. They have been “the holy grail of Thomas scholars up until now,” said Goodby, a professor at Swansea university and editor of the centenary edition of Thomas’s Collected Poems.

The notebook contains some of Thomas’s most surreal and challenging poetry, poems such as Altarwise by Owl-light and I, in my intricate image, which in the notebook is three separate poems.

Goodby said even he did not understand everything Thomas was trying to say. Some of that was deliberate on the poet’s part, some of it may not have been. “It may be that the notebook will help us to clear up the unconstruable bits.”

Goodby added: “For a scholar these represent a crucial point of his development. It is the point at which his poetry is becoming more experimental, more abstract, more dense. He pushed it and pushed it and pushed it until about 1937 and he couldn’t take it any more, the language was getting too dense and he pulled back a bit.”

The notebook can be roughly dated as Thomas finished his fourth notebook on 30 April 1934 and the first poem in this notebook is All All and All the Dry Worlds Lever – a poem that, on 20 July, he sent to his lover Pamela Hansford Johnson.

All All and All is written as it was published but other poems have considerable amendments and crossings out with Altarwise by Owl-light the most heavily revised, a reflection probably of its intricacy. For example, Thomas’s original third line was, the notebook reveals, “Clutching the hang-nail and the shafted arm”. That has been crossed out and replaced with “Abaddon in the hang-nail cracked from Adam”.

There are also many interesting annotations. At the end of the first section of Altarwise by Owl-Light he has scribbled August 35 Glen Lough – a reference to the isolated valley in Donegal where he stayed, organised by his agent Geoffrey Grigson who was keen to get Thomas off the booze.

Another poem in the notebook, then with the opening line “They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles” but subsequently published as part 3 of I, in my intricate image, is dated Disley, May [1935] and dedicated “To A and M”. That is a reference to the historian AJP Taylor and his wife Margaret, his friends at the time.

They all got along at the time and Thomas stayed with the Taylors at their home in Disley, Cheshire, though things went awry some years later because of an unhealthy infatuation Margaret developed for the poet.

The notebooks were essential to Thomas because he used them to quarry for poems he wanted published. Also in the notebook are: I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking; I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain; Now/Say nay/Man dry man; Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s mouth; Incarnate devil in a talking snake; and Foster the light, nor veil the manshaped moon.

It will never be known if Yvonne Macnamara asked for the notebook to be burned because of animus towards Thomas, or simply because she thought it was rubbish. “It may be that she did not see any reason as to why she should hang on to her son-in-law’s scraps of manuscript,” said Heaton. Nor is it known if Thomas deliberately discarded it or just lost it. Certainly he had no thoughts of a notebook being valuable and he was never exactly careful with manuscripts – he twice lost Under Milk Wood, leaving it once in a Cardiff hotel and later in a London pub.

The family consigning the notebook are related to Louie King but prefer to remain anonymous. It will be sold on 9 December and has an estimate of £100,000-£150,000.