SOURCE: “Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters,” in Harper's Bazaar, No. 3019, June, 1963, pp. 68-69, 115.

In the following essay, which was originally read as an introduction to his reading of a selection from Spoon River on the BBC, Thomas notes his interest in American literature and discusses the influence of Spoon River on his own Under Milk Wood.

The collection of short free-verse poems called Spoon River Anthology written by Edgar Lee Masters, a Chicago lawyer, was published in 1915 when he was forty-five years old; and it shocked the American public so profoundly that it sold a great number of copies. It became the first best seller of the ‘poetic Renaissance’ which began in the Middle West with Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg and Harriet Monroe's oddly-named Poetry: a Magazine of Verse; and the memories of its sensational success have lasted so long that even today it is regarded...