Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry

by Anthony Conran

Overview

In this impressive and important work, Conran examines the impact on a selection of prominent Anglo-Welsh poets, Idris Davies, Dylan Thomas and David Jones among them, of an awareness of 'frontier' - between the Welsh and their dominant partners in Great Britain and within Wales itself, where two ways of life, two civilizations and two languages both divide and subtly interconnect.

This collection of essays offers fresh perspectives on Welsh writing in English as a whole, while also focusing illuminatingly on individual authors. It represents the mature and often controversial views of one of Anglo-Welsh literature's foremost critics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780708313954
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	06/20/1997
Series:	CYMRU-Contemporary German Writers Ser.
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

This is the second collection of critical essays by the poet, dramatist and critic Tony Conran. His first collection, The Cost of Strangeness, was published in 1982.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
 
Part I
1.    The 'Welsh way of life' and its poetry
2.    Displaced poets of the way of life: W.H. Davies, Huw Menai and A.G. Prys-Jones
3.    The Anglo-Welsh vanishing point: the Eastaway of Edward Thomas
4.    Pilgrims from a desert land: a study of Idris Davies's two sequences and Gwenallt's 'Y meirwon' as responses to the Great Depression
 
Part II
5.    Buried treasure
6.    Gerard Hopkins as an Anglo-Welsh poet
7.    David Jones and the ironic epic
 
Part III
8.    The advent of modernism
9.    'I saw time murder me': Dylan Thomas and the tragic soliloquy
10.  A lonely path: the early poetry of Glyn Jones
11.  Lynette Roberts
 
Part IV
12.  The end of an era
13.  The new frontier: R.S. Thomas
14.  Roland Mathias: headmaster, critic and poet
 
Part V
15.  Exile and elegy in the poetry of T. Harri Jones
16.  Telling the dead go home: the poetry of Leslie Norris
17.  Funland and the work of Dannie Abse
18.  An abdication from time: the Collected Poems of Raymond Garlick
19.  The Referendum and the poetry of Jon Dressel
20.  Tony Curtis and the ways of Death
 
List of authors and their major works
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

His keen awareness of how Welsh society and literature have changed over the last hundred years has enabled him to write what nearly amounts to a history of Anglo Welsh writing and to put our writers in a context where their achievement can be properly seen. This is an important book that all students and critics of contemporary literature will have to read and think about.” –Western Mail

Western Mail

This wide-ranging and well-written book is full of interesting arguments and illuminating apercus. It displays a lively intellect and a passionate love for poetry, which make it a delight to read.” –Friends of the Dymock Poets Newsletter

Friends of the Dymock Poets Newsletter

“Throughout the book, Conran sustains a series of arguments which are often challenging in their views, and more than once controversial . . . a comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable study about the fundermental aspects of Anglo-Welsh poetry.” –Books in Wales

Books in Wales

. . . the book will, rightly be used as an excellent introduction to its subject . . .” –Modern Language Review

Modern Language Review