Buffalo Collection: Notebooks

In his tiny bedroom at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, a young Dylan fills notebooks with poems. He completes innumerable exercise books full of poems, but of those, only four will survive. Between this time and his nineteenth birthday Dylan will write around two hundred poems, which will form.

In 1941, Dylan is in desperate need of money, and sells four of his notebooks. He mentions these in a letter, describing them as documents that show the growth of poems over a period of just over a year, one extremely creative, productive year, in all their stages and alterations, and – in many instances – show how quite a different poem emerges, years later, from the original.