A fascinating and exhilarating look at the many ways we love, and are loved. Following on from his bestselling The History of Wales in Twelve Poems, M. Wynn Thomas turns his attention in A Map of Love to poems from Wales and reflects on what they have to say on the age-old subject of love in its many and varied forms. Featuring twelve pieces dating from the fourteenth century to the present, this absorbing collection deliberately veers far from cliched verses with its poems of regret and of mourning; straight love and gay love; bawdy verses of passion and desire, and gentle meditations on motherhood and marriage. It features anonymous and lesser-known writers as well as household names such as Gillian Clarke and R. S. Thomas, and it includes a previously unpublished poem by Emyr Humphreys. With original illustrations by Ruth Jen Evans throughout, this short but powerful collection will appeal to anyone interested in people and their complex relationships.

Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives the general reader a sense of the view to be seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, the poems give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, that is internationally renowned for its distinction, demonstrating how Wales boast one of the oldest and yet continuing vibrant poetic traditions, the former in the Welsh language and the latter in English and bilingually.

The great religious poetry of R. S. Thomas and the poetry of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is rooted in a remarkable late-twentieth-century tradition of spiritual poetry in Wales that includes figures as different as Saunders Lewis and Vernon Watkins, Waldo Williams and Bobi Jones. This study examines this body of work in detail, demonstrating how the different theological outlooks of the poets was reflected in their choice of form, style and vocabulary. It thereby highlights a literary culture that was highly unusual in its rejection of the secularisation that prevailed during that period in the UK, Western Europe and the USA.

Certain simple and stereotypical images of Wales strike an immediate chord with the public, both in Wales itself and beyond its borders. For much of the twentieth century, the country was thought of as 'The Valleys', a land of miners and choirs and rugby clubs. This image of a 'Proletarian Wales' (with its attendant Socialist politics) dominated popular imagination, just as the image of 'Nonconformist Wales' - a Wales of chapels and of a grimly puritan society - had gripped the imagination of the High Victorian era. But what of the Wales of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades? What image of Wales prevailed at that time of revolutionary social, economic, cultural, religious and political change? This book argues that several competing images of Welshness were put in circulation during that time, and proceeds to examine several of the most influential of these as they took the form of literary texts.

The study places the work of a major religious poet of the late twentieth century in a number of striking new perspectives that allow him to be viewed for the first time as an 'alternative' war poet, a conscience-stricken pacifist, a jealously opportunistic student of art, and an experimental biographer of the modern soul. Published to mark the centenary of the 'ogre of Wales', this volume deals with the idees fixes that serially possessed the fiercely intense imagination of R. S. Thomas: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family and, of course, a vexingly elusive deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring Thomas's poetry into startling new relief. The war poetry is considered alongside the poet's early relationship to the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of the poetry's concerns; the intriguing 'secret code' of some of Thomas's Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are brought centre-stage from the peripheries to which they have been routinely relegated.

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.

R.S. Thomas is the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry. The variety of his themes - disappearing ways of life, man's relationship with God, cultural imperialism and the decline of the Welsh language, art in the last 100 years, nature and the environment - has brought him an audience from a wide cross-section of society. This collection of essays was specially commissioned to celebrate his 80th birthday. The subjects range across the Thomas canon, from his Welsh farmer persona, Iago Prytherch, to a comparison with Dylan Thomas, to his unsteady relations with God. Contributors include Walford Davies, Rowan Williams, Tony Brown and Helen Vendler.

Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country's internal diversity. To that end, the author's examined range - from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as 'Margiad Evans', to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a 'micro-cosmopolitan country', and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

R.S. Thomas is the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry. The variety of his themes - disappearing ways of life, man's relationship with God, cultural imperialism and the decline of the Welsh language, art in the last 100 years, nature and the environment - has brought him an audience from a wide cross-section of society. This collection of essays was specially commissioned to celebrate his 80th birthday. The subjects range across the Thomas canon, from his Welsh farmer persona, Iago Prytherch, to a comparison with Dylan Thomas, to his unsteady relations with God. Contributors include Walford Davies, Rowan Williams, Tony Brown and Helen Vendler.

Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country's internal diversity. To that end, the author's examined range - from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as 'Margiad Evans', to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a 'micro-cosmopolitan country', and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

Dyma gasgliad o ysgrifau sy'n archwilio rhai o'r dolennau cyswllt cymhleth a chyfoethog rhwng diwylliannau llen Cymraeg a llen Saesneg Cymru dros ganrif a mwy. Mae'r testunau a drafodir yn amrywio o bynciau cyffredinol (tarddiad y syniad fod y Cymry yn genedl gapelog; delweddau Cymru o Ewrop; ei hagwedd at y Taleithiau) i ddadansoddiadau manwl o weithiau unigol (Gwaed yr Uchelwyr; Ymadawiad Arthur); ac astudiaeth o awduron sydd wedi eu hanwybyddu i raddau helaeth (Pennar Davies; Alun Llywelyn-Williams).

Certain simple and stereotypical images of Wales strike an immediate chord with the public, both in Wales itself and beyond its borders. For much of the twentieth century, the country was thought of as 'The Valleys', a land of miners and choirs and rugby clubs. This image of a 'Proletarian Wales' (with its attendant Socialist politics) dominated popular imagination, just as the image of 'Nonconformist Wales' - a Wales of chapels and of a grimly puritan society - had gripped the imagination of the High Victorian era. But what of the Wales of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades? What image of Wales prevailed at that time of revolutionary social, economic, cultural, religious and political change? This book argues that several competing images of Welshness were put in circulation during that time, and proceeds to examine several of the most influential of these as they took the form of literary texts.

This work aims at presenting Kitchener Davies as a pioneering, versatile author whose literary output continues to be of value. The selection also contains two introductory essays - the first introduces the man and his work and the second is a semi-personal view of Davis by his daughter Manon Rhys.

Walt Whitman stands freshly illuminated in this powerful portrait of the poet responding to his times. Whitman's idealistic expectations of democracy were painfully eroded by the rapidly expanding urban capitalism that, before the Civil War, increasingly threatened the economic and political power of the ordinary American. His poetry during this, his most fruitful period, became the indispensable medium allowing him to adjust to these developments. He succeeded in portraying this modern society as an invigorating natural extension of the artisanal order. After the war, however, American capitalism advanced at a pace that made it impossible for Whitman to redeem it through his poetry. His imagination defeated by realities, he invested more and more in dreams of the future, while his poetry turned to the past, Memory emerging as a central figure. In this many-sided analysis M. Wynn Thomas relates Whitman's work to American painting of the period; examines the poet's evocation of nature, which he sometimes saw as a challenge to man's confidence in himself; documents the revisions and additions Whitman made to Leaves of Grass in order to demonstrate that "my Book and the War are One"; and pays sympathetic attention to the postwar poetry, usually slighted.

Published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2019, this is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of the life and work (excluding only work for television) of the major Welsh writer Emyr Humphreys. During the course of a career spanning half a century, and dating back to the 1950s when he collaborated with the likes of Graham Greene, Patrick Heron, Saunders Lewis, Richard Burton, Sian Phillips and Peter O'Toole, Humphreys has published some two dozen works of fiction (including Outside the House of Baal, the greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature) as well as highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. In addition to offering a critical and interpretative survey of this remarkable, distinguished body of work, the present volume also sets Humphreys's output in the context of the dramatic, transformative decades in recent Welsh history during which it was produced.

A facsimilie copy of his most influential work by Morgan Llwyd (1619-1659), being a powerful and multi-layered allegory in the form of a conversation between three birds - an eagle, a raven and a dove - which represent the State, the Established Church and the Puritans. First published in 1653, the facsimilie is taken from the Guild of Graduates's edition of the work.

The Brexit debates confirmed how Wales's relationship to Europe has for too long been discussed exclusively, narrowly and suffocatingly in terms of its social, political and economic aspects. As a contrast, this volume sets out to explore the rich, inventive and exhilarating spectrum of pro-European sentiment evident from 1848 to 1980 in the writings of Welsh intellectuals and creative writers. It ranges from the era of O. M. Edwards, through the interwar period when both right wing (Saunders Lewis) and left wing (Cyril Cule) ideologies clashed, to the post-war age when major writers such as Emyr Humphreys and Raymond Williams became influential. This study clearly demonstrates that far from being insular and parochial, Welsh culture has long been hospitably internationalist. As the very title Eutopia concedes, there have of course been frequently utopian aspects to Wales's dreams of Europe. However, while some may choose to dismiss them as examples of mere wishful thinking, others may fruitfully appreciate their aspirational and inspirational aspects.

A comprehensive study of the medieval tale Peredur, comprising six articles in Welsh and one in English by renowned scholars exploring the history of the manuscript, its language and style, together with the social and European context of the text, thus throwing new light on the tales of the Mabinogion in general.

In this series of textual readings and cultural comparisons, M. Wynn Thomas explores Whitman's amazing ability to appeal across distances and centuries. The book's contrasting sections reflect the two locations studied: the first shows Whitman in his time and place, while the second repositions him within the cultures of England and Wales from the late 19th to the late 20th century. In the opening chapter he is placed against the vivid, outrageous background of the New York of his time; the second finds evidence in his poetry of a critique of the new urban politics of the emerging city boss; the third radically redefines Whitman's relationship to his famous contemporary Longfellow. Other chapters deal with the Civil War poet, exploring the ways in which his poetic responses were in part shaped by his relationship to his soldier brother George, and his use of the meteorological discoveries of his day to fashion metaphors for imaging the different phases of the conflict. The second section ponders the paradox that this Whitman, who was so much the product of his specific time and limited ""local"" culture, should come to be accepted as an international visionary. The United Kingdom is taken as offering striking instances of this phenomenon, and his transatlantic admirers are shown to have been engaged in an unconscious process of ""translating"" Whitman into the terms of their own culturally specific social, political, and sexual preoccupations. Some of the connections explored are those between Whitman and Edward Carpenter, the so-called English Whitman; between Whitman and perhaps his greatest English critic, D. H. Lawrence; and between Whitman and the Welsh poets Ernest Rhys, Amanwy (David Rees Griffiths), Niclas y Glais (T. E. Nicholas), Waldo Williams, Glyn Jones, Dylan Thomas, and R. S. Thomas. This bold and original study, offering new points of entry into understanding Whitman as the product of his time and place as well as understanding the reception of Whitman in the U.K. as a process of cultural translation, should fascinate scholars of Whitman and students of comparative literature.

A fascinating collection of thirteen articles dealing with various aspects of the cultural relationship between Wales and the United States of America in the 20th century, in the fields of literature and architecture, music and art, language and politics, and personal recollections by renowned scholars. 9 black-and-white photographs.

This volume contains essays by eight different authors, discussing the relationship between literature in Welsh and literature in English in Wales. This is the first in a series looking at the Welsh mind and imagination, edited by John Rowlands.

This delightful collection of essays and poems in the area of Welsh music studies is an affectionate tribute to two great 'Bearers of Song', Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney. The volume has been assembled by their friends and colleagues as a celebration of their immeasurable contribution to the culture, music and language of Wales over the last fifty years. All of the material is presented fully bilingually in both English and Welsh, and there are numerous musical examples and illustrations. Two of Wales' leading poets, Tony Conran and Gwyn Thomas, offer specially-commissioned works for Mered and Phyllis, while Robin Gwyndaf contributes the poem that gives the volume its title. There is also a warm appreciation of the couple's joint achievement by R.Geraint Gruffydd and an extensive bibliography of their complete writings by Huw Walters.