So says actor Celyn Jones in assessing the worth of a poem by Dylan Thomas that has resurfaced more than 70 years after its publication in a little-known British magazine called Lilliput.

The poem A Dream of Winter was to be read by Jones (who played Thomas in the bio-film Set Fire to the Stars) on Friday at a London pub. It shouldn't take long, comprising as it does just eight verses of three lines each.

Jones said this week: "It is quite incredible to think that after all these years a poem by one of the 20th century's most famous writers had gone by unnoticed. It's a beautiful poem and is full of classic Dylan traits."

This can be a very good thing. Or not. In his brief, bellicose life, Thomas was an alchemist of language. Words, sounds, images, rhythms, he threw everything into the fire of creation. Some things came out melted and misshapen, and others emerged golden and eternal.

In the beginning, Thomas was precocious and prodigious. He burst upon the literary scene in London, aged 19. One of his most famous poems And Death Shall Have No Dominion was published in the New English Weekly in 1933. The next year Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines was published in The Listener and, in 1935, his first collection, 18 Poems, was published.

He had the ear of the literary establishment. Writers such as T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Stephen Spender were taking notice. That year, the magazine New Verse, published The Hand That Signed the Paper (a title with much resonance in Australia decades later). In 1936, his next volume Twenty-Five Poems appeared.

Thomas's train was now rolling. The writer veered from poetry to prose to radio scripts, short stories and essays and, just as wildly, veered and lurched from one discombobulating discourse to another. He liked a drink. He drank and then he drank some more just to be sure that he had had a drink.

Was it fuelling the pen or drowning the man? Perhaps both. He was a celebrity speaker on tours of America. He brought to the podium, the greatest unknown, that being whether he could manage to pull the performance off. He usually did. Led Zeppelin had nothing on him. One year before he died in New York he gave the world his poetic masterpiece Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. His radio play Under  Milkwood was published after his death in 1953.

Thomas, at his glittering, dazzling best, could truly sign the paper that could fell a city. But he also gave the world much gargling gimcrackery. Obscurantism had no greater dominion than in his realm. Verbal density is a polite way of describing it. "With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack/Sneak down the stallion grave,/Bull's-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack/And free the twin-boxed grief."

So is then A Dream of Winter a classic or a car wreck? The piece arose from captions Thomas wrote for a series of pictures legendary photographer Bill Brandt had taken for Lilliput. (One of Brandt's famous portraits is of Thomas from 1941, pints of beer before him in a pub.)

Professor John Goodby, an expert on Thomas' work, found the poem when he received a book that once belonged to a former teacher of his. Inside was the ripped-out magazine page and on it, the forgotten poem. "I had never come across the poem before – though there were fleeting references to it in some of Dylan's letters. When I finally saw it I couldn't believe it."

But is it the equivalent of a lost Beatles song, as Celyn Jones asserts?

The Fab Four reference point is useful. In contemporary music, The Beatles are the gold standard in songwriters. But they did write the odd dud. Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite really wasn't for the benefit of anyone.

However, a lost song found is, regardless of its merit, an event. In classical circles, such manuscripts have been discovered, from Stravinsky to Bach and beyond. Similarly in literature: 20 unknown poems by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda were found last year among his papers.

Beneath the hyperbole, the greater truth may be that in the discovery is the importance. It helps to complete the portrait of the artist. Whether it's Mr Kite or Eleanor Rigby is of minor note.

Few portraits, however, are ever complete. If you take the view of French writer Paul Valery that "in the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished . . . but abandoned", then the world should look and hear a new-found work of art with an open mind. After all, it might have been abandoned for good reason.

Let's leave the last words to Dylan Thomas: "Poetry, recording the stripping of the individual darkness, must inevitably cast light upon what has been hidden for too long and, by doing so, make clean the naked exposure.

"All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be."