David, just briefly and in passing, and hurriedly, although I would agree
with almost all of your posting, I would beg askance at the use of 'always'
in 'that Wales has always lacked a distinctive and vibrant political
culture that has driven the variety of writing elsewhere in the North
Atlantic archipelago'. I'd say it's more a post-war phenomenon. I think too,
we should remember that, as well as its own unique poetic tradition in
Welsh, Welsh poets in English of the past were largely subsumed into English
literary identity: as well as Edward Thomas one could fairly argue that
Herbert, Vaughan, Owen and even Hopkins and Donne were, in deep identity,
'Welsh'.
And that it is a country whose English name derives from the Saxon for
'foreigner' or 'stranger'.
cheers
david b.
----- Original that Wales has always
From: David Kennedy <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 7:39 AM
Subject: Re: Wales
> "I am not making any particular claims (David K) for a Welsh poetic
> renaissance. I still don't know Welsh poetry well enough to be able to say
> one way or another. But I don't think it was fair to single Wales out
(David
> B) as culture-starved and lacking in a sense of identity."
>
> I don't think there's a lack of identity but there is what one could
> politely call a different level of achievement in Welsh writing in
English.
> Tony Conran wrote an article many years ago arguing that this was because
> poetry in Wales was dominated by school teachers - everyone got a bit
miffed
> about it so I guess he struck a nerve. My own feeling is that Wales has
> forgotten its own modernist heritage - David Jones - and has also lacked a
> generation of writers comparable to the Dunn/Harrison generation in
England.
> [Wales doesn't value its own interesting writers like John Davies and Tony
> Conran.]
>
> Welsh writing in English has not therefore responded to the same things
that
> writing in English has elsewhere in the British Isles: class, modernist
vs.
> anti-modernist. The Welsh seem to think that people like Catherine Fisher
> are important poets but I always want to ask things like *where's the
Welsh
> Bill Herbert?*. And I can never work out whether the Seren list generally
> displays a failure of taste or a lack of courage. I tried to cover all
this
> in more detail in a long review of the Oxygen antho in a recent issue of
> Poetry Wales where I draw on historians to argue that Wales has always
> lacked a distinctive and vibrant political culture that has driven the
> variety of writing elsewhere in the North Atlantic archipelago.
> cheers
> David
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