‘The death of Dylan Thomas’, as Karl Shapiro put it, ‘was the cause of the most singular demonstration of suffering in modern literary history. One searches the memory in vain for any parallel to it’. The mourning was on an appropriately mythic scale, and it crossed social and cultural boundaries; not only were there two Times obituaries, but one by the popular columnist ‘Vicky’ in The Daily Mirror. It was most intense in the US, where guilt and the sense that Thomas symbolised the charisma missing from post-war society intensified the response. But everywhere, he was seen as a rebel against modern, mass society's ‘control, complacency and deliberation’ and as one who, ‘magnificently ill-equipped to deal with the modern world’, in Cyril Connolly's phrase, had become a ‘victim of the organization man’. Indeed, for some, it was lyric poetry itself, or even a certain kind of human possibility, which had been lost. He was seen as ‘the first modern romantic … who offered himself up as a public, not a private, sacrifice’, exemplifying the point made by Jacqueline Rose of Sylvia Plath – that one of the things that the reception of such poets reveals about our ‘general culture’ is the ‘perverse component (voyeurism and sadism) of [its] public acclaim’.