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Terribly sorry to hear about Ralph's death. I know nothing of his work on Olson, but his first career, as it were, was as a pioneering Dylan Thomas scholar and that's how I knew and will remember him. Our only meeting was at a Thomas symposium I helped organise in Swansea in 1998. Ralph turned up, and was enthusiastically supportive, made a virtuoso contribution in a paper on 'A saint about to fall', and gave me a copy of his seminal study, Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry (1963). He didn't agree with the application of modern critical theory to Thomas in a New Casebook I co-edited with Chris Wigginton in 2001, and a friendship didn't develop; but his work (along with that of Walford Davies) was the bedrock on which all subsequent scholarship on Thomas has been built, and I retained a huge respect for him - my study The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013) and new Collected Poems (2014) are greatly in his debt. He edited the Broadcasts in 1991, and co-edited what was for twenty-six years the standard UK edition of the Collected Poems (with Walford Davies in 1988); he also co-edited, again with Walford Davies, a definitive edition of Under Milk Wood. In 2003 he brought out poem-by-poem guide titled Where Have The Old Words Got Me? - a book that, despite its occasional lapses, is still the sanest and most useful of its kind. His most remarkable contribution to Thomas scholarship, Entrances aside, was his edition of the four Dylan Thomas notebooks. These had been bought by the Special Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo in 1941, but previously only seen by scholars. Ralph's edition appeared in 1967 in the US and in 1968 in the UK (as Poet in the Making) and was a model of painstaking and enlightening scholarship; for the first time it revealed exactly how Thomas had gone about forging the 'process' style of 18 Poems. (Ralph's acknowledgements include one, of particular interest to members of this list otherwise uninterested in Thomas, to 'Jeremy Prynne, whose eyes I have used on the manuscript at various times.') He would have been enthralled by the newly-discovered fifth notebook, a direct chronological continuation of the four he edited, which was bought at Sotheby's earlier this week by Swansea University. I thought his work on Thomas (and Olson, when I read it, as I now will) would be all I'd know about Ralph; but last year I was at a get-together at Leeds University of former editors of Poetry & Audience, the UK's longest-running student poetry magazine, to mark its 60th anniversary. It transpired that P&A was founded by Ralph when he was postgraduate student at Leeds - tales survive in the folk memory of the School of English of him hand-printing the first issues and managing to sell them on the street to passers-by, as well as to fellow-students. It must have been among the very first stirrings of the poetic ferment at Leeds that later included Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Jon Silkin and the rest. 1953 was also the year of Thomas's death, which may or may not be a coincidence: whatever, I'd like to think of Ralph's founding of P&A as an example of 'the force' that 'blasts the roots of trees' simultaneously being the one that 'through the green fuse drives the flower'. On 11 December 2014 at 22:14, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Ralph Maud has died at the age of 86. Dylan Thomas scholar, Charles Olson > scholar, familiar and friend of many British and American poets. Last time > I saw him he was moving round Britain with an enormous print-out in his > luggage trying to create a *second *replica of Olson's library. > > PR >