M. Wynn Thomas is a professor of English and the director of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author of more than twenty books in both English and Welsh, including The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry, acknowledged as a landmark work in Whitman scholarship, and Dail Glaswellt, a translation into Welsh of poems from Leaves of Grass. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the highest honor available to a British scholar.