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Contains Idris Davies's well-known works, as well as a large number of previously unpublished works. The text includes notes which provide details of the publishing history and aid in the comprehension of the poems.
Through the voices of ordinary people caught up in the struggle, The Angry Summer graphically illustrates the plight of the miners and their families during the six-month-long miners' strike of 1926 - 'the summer of soups and speeches'. Idris Davies himself left school at the age of fourteen to become a miner and it was the strike of 1926 that forced him to look elsewhere for work. He is perhaps the most authentic socialist poet of the inter-war years to write in English, because he speaks out of the experience of his own working-class community. This volume presents for the first time a properly annotated edition of the poem, an introduction by Tony Conran explaining the biographical, historical and literary background, and is also illustrated with photographs, newspaper cuttings and eyewitness accounts.
Popular anthologies hold that the Romantic Era in Great Britain ended promptly in 1832 and that the early Twentieth Century was the time of Modernism and the rejection of the Romantic in British letters. However, in Wales, just the opposite was true. This study traces the work of poets and novelists in Wales in the early- to mid-Twentieth Century who all found their poetic master to be William Wordsworth. In the early part of the century, W. H. Davies, John Cowper Powys and Huw Menai – a tramp, a mystic novelist and a coal miner – produce novels and poetry with Wordsworth as their acknowledged master. By mid-century, Idris Davies, a coal miner turned teacher, R. S. Thomas, an Anglican priest, and Leslie Norris, another teacher, are writing in the “mountainous shadow of William Wordsworth.” While the literary lights of London are leading the Modernist revolution, in Wales, the inspiration is still the English poet, Wordsworth. This study will illuminate this flare up of Romanticism, and show the way in which Romanticism re-emerges from unexpected quarters.