Module Identifier ENM6220  
Module Title TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANGLO-WELSH POETRY  
Academic Year 2001/2002  
Co-ordinator To Be Arranged  
Semester Available semesters 1 and 2  
Other staff Dr Damian Walford Davies  
Course delivery Seminar   5 Hours 5 x 2 hours  
Assessment Essay   1 x 5,000 word essay    

Content


1. 'Being Anglo-anything is really tough' (John Davies, 'How to write Anglo-Welsh poetry')


   What is 'Anglo-Welsh' poetry? Debates about the nature of Anglo-Welsh poetry - its defining characteristics and preoccupations
   - have long been a feature of the prefaces and introductions to the anthologies of Anglo-Welsh poetry published this century.   
   This session wil focus on the cultural agendas of these anthologies and their differing conceptions of Anglo-Welsh identity.   
   Taken together, these prefatory pronouncements represent a fascinating forum for debate. Is Anglo-Welsh poetry a definable
   entity? A product of a distrinct Welsh 'sensibility'? A literature of Wales rather than merely a regional literature? Are we to speak
   of 'Anglo-Welsh poetry' or rather of 'Welsh Writing in English'? The session will function as a corrective to any simple notion of
   what constitutes Anglo-Welsh poetry.


2. War: Theme and Watershed
   
   This session will focus on reactions to the Frist and Second World Wars in Anglo-Welsh poetry, and on other conflicts, recent
   and historical. Poets whose work will be considered here include: Edward Thomas; David Jones; Alun Lewis; Dylan Thomas;
   R S Thomas; Harri Webb; Gillian Clarke; Anthony Conran.


3. Urban/Rural; Industrial/Pastoral
   'Dream no more on your mountains' (Idris Davies, Gwalia Deserta)


   What are the landscapes of Anglo-Welsh poetry? 'Poetry of Place': what is it? In what ways does a sense of geographical
   rootedness and belonging inform twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poetry? This session will explore the social and geographical
   backgrounds of Anglo-Welsh poets, and will analyse the tensions between the urban and the rural, the industrial and the
   environmental, in their verse. Poets considered will include: Idris Davies; Glyn Jones; Dylan Thomas; R S Thomas; Leslie Norris;
   Ruth Bidgood; Dannie Abse; Christine Evans; Robert Minhinnick


4. Anglo-Welsh Elegies

   Informing this session is the relation between twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poetry and the conventions, forms, and structures
   of the Welsh language tradition of praise poetry. The session will consider poets' attitudes to loss of various kinds - of relations,
   friends, of childhood, of ways of life - by focusing specifically on the elegy, and what twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poets have
   made of it. Work by Jean Earle; Dylan Thomas; R S Thomas; T H Jones; John Ormond; Dannie Abse; Raymond Garlick;
   Gillian Clarke; Tony Curtis; Douglas Houston; and Nigel Jenkins will be considered here.


5. Craft or sullen art?


   This session will analyse a number of poems in which poets consider the nature of their art. Together with the first session, this
   analysis of self-reflexive poems will provide an illuminating frame for this Module. Writers whose work will be considered here
   include Dylan Thomas; R S Thomas; Hari Webb; Leslie Norris; John Ormond; John Davies; Gwyneth Lewis.


Editions


"Twentieth-Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry, ed. Dannie Abse (Bridgend, 1997)
"Anglo-Welsh Poetry, 1480-1980", eds Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias (Bridgend, 1984)
"Welsh verse" translations by Tony Conran (Bridgend, 1992)


Selected Reading


Raymond Garlick, "An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature" (Cardiff, 1970)
John Harris, "A Bibliographical Guide to Twenty-Four Modern Anglo-Welsh Writers" (Cardiff, 1994)
Saunders Lewis, "Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?" (Lecture, Cardiff, 1939)
Wynn Thomas, "Hidden Attachments: aspects of the relationship between the two literatures of modern Wales' in "Welsh Writing in English": A Yearbook of Critical Essays" (1,1995)
Wynn Thomas, "Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales" (Cardiff, 1992)
Various monographs in the Writers of Wales series "Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays"
"The Welsh Review"; "Dock Leaves/The Anglo-Welsh Review"; "Planet"; "The New Welsh Review"; "Poetry Wales"