Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is not surprising that John Cowper Powys, after he moved to Corwen, decided to begin a novel about Owain Glyndŵr, as it was in Corwen that Glyndŵr's rebellion against Henry IV began on 16 September 1400, [65] when he formally assumed the ancestral title of Prince of Powys at his manor house of Glyndyfrdwy, then in the parish of Corwen. In September 1935, Phyllis Playter had suggested he should write a historical novel about Owain Glyndŵr. [66] An important aspect of Owen Glendower are historical parallels between the beginning of the 15th century and the late 1930s and early 1940s: "A sense of contemporataneousness is ever present in Owen Glendower. We are in a world of change like our own". [67] The novel was conceived at a time when the " Spanish Civil War [note 1] was a major topic of public debate" and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after World War II had begun. [68]

One always looks in English literature, doesn’t one. for “Is there anything left by Shakespeare for us to do? Is there any corner where his mastery does not touch?” I find Shakespeare on animals utterly intolerable. Powys talks about the point of view of mud, the point of view of flowers, the real essence of things, King Arthur, the village people, men, women, children, animals — everything.’ — Gail Godwin It is clear from Powys's diaries that his new-found success was much helped by the stability that his relationship with Phyllis Playter gave him and her frequent advice on his work in progress. [48]

Powys's first published works were poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes […] of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of Milton and Wordsworth and Keats". These were published with the assistance of his cousin Ralph Shirley, who was a director of William Rider and Son the publisher of them. [31] In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as Lucifer in 1956. [32] There were three further volumes of poetry: Wolf's Bane (1916), Mandragora (1917) and Samphire (1922). The first two collections were published by Powys's manager G. Arnold Shaw. An unfinished, short narrative poem "The Ridge" was published in January 1963, shortly before Powys's death that June. [33] In 1964 Kenneth Hopkins published John Cowper Powys: A Selection from his Poems and in 1979 the Welsh poet and critic Roland Mathias thought this side of Powys worthy of critical study and published The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk: John Cowper Powys as Poet. [34] Belinda Humfrey, suggests that "[p]erhaps Powys's best poems are those given to Jason Otter in Wolf Solent and Taliessin in Porius." [35] Herbert Williams, p. 55, Robin Paterson, "Powys in Canada: John Cowper Powys's Canadian Lectures". Powys Notes (1994/95, p. 33. The first is almost puerile to say — the books are very very long, and very taxing to read. I think Powys’s committed, passionate lovers, as almost everyone here is tonight, sometimes forget this.

The Dorset Year: The Diary of John Cowper Powys, 1934-1935, ed. Morine Krissdóttir and Roger Peers (1998) As I wrote Wolf Solent travelling through […] the United States […] I became more and more intensely aware […] of the country round Sherborne; with the Abbey and the Preparatory School and the Big School". [3] Robert Timlin, “Jimmy Plays Hopscotch: The Role of Redfern in ‘Wolf Solent.’” The Powys Journal, vol. 11, 2001, pp. 165–190, p.189. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26106194. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020. Morine Krissdottir in her biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, dates the action of the novel as taking place between March 1921 and May 1922, just three years after the end of World War I and notes that a "triumphal Victory Arch" was formally opened as the main entrance to Waterloo Station in London on 21 March 1922, to be a memorial to the dead. She also records that "in an ironic twist, the steps [of the Victory Arch] soon became a place where beggars, many of them mentally and physically crippled ex-servicemen, gathered". [64] Furthermore, she also suggests that while there is no direct reference to the war in Wolf Solent "the metaphors and imagery" do in fact allude to it, and that "[t]he novel is in fact about a world after the great war--a world in which everything is irrevocably changed". [65] Critical reception [ edit ] Just as the landscape of Dorset and Somerset and the characters' deep personal relationships with it had been of importance in the great Wessex novels, so the landscape of Wales was now significant, especially that of the Corwen region.Drabble, Margaret (11 August 2006). "Margaret Drabble on John Cowper Powys" . Retrieved 17 May 2019– via www.theguardian.com. The face on the Waterloo steps [ edit ] Victory Arch, Waterloo station's main entrance, where Wolf Solent had seen the look of "inert despair" on a man's face. The arch was a memorial to the dead of World War I. [59] See Ben Jones "The 'mysterious word Esplumeoir' and Polyphonic Structure" in A Glastonbury Romance in In the Spirit of Powys, p. 80. Edeirnion, Denbighshire, Wales Genealogy Genealogy - FamilySearch Wiki". www.familysearch.org. 27 March 2019 . Retrieved 17 May 2019. Two Canons: On the Meaning of Powys's Relation to Scott and his Turn to Historical Fiction", Western Humanities Review, vol. LVII, no. 1, Spring 2003, p. 103.