Welsh Journals

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ANSWER TO QUESTIONNAIRE JOHN COWPER POWYS 1. Do you consider yourself an Anglo-Welsh writer ? I would indeed like to be an Anglo-Welsh writer; and I hope in time when I have succeeded in at least learning to read and write Welsh that I may be in a position to take a part in Welsh life worthy of my Welsh ancestors. 2. For Whom do you Write ? I seem to write for a minority of very individual and rather odd characters who appear to be scattered through many countries- including Wales-and certainly through all classes in such countries 3. What is your opinion of the relationship between Literature and Society ? My feeling about this question is that it is so vague and covers such a multitude of aspects and problems in all individual human lives that it becomes one of those purely academic from which a writer within three years of his seventieth year instinctively turns with a sigh, feeling that all those Minute Particles which Blake says are the important thing can so easily be slurred over here-in any possible answer I But I think (with Goethe) that writers are joined in the fashion of their age by their weakness and not by their strength; and if the Mass-thought of the Community is what this question implies, I hold, as an anarchistic individualist, that the business of a writer is to oppose himself, on the strength of the wisdom of many ages and many lands and many cults, to this mass-thought evoked as it is by propaganda of the crudest kind and insulting as it is to the best tradition of the Community in question, which has been created not by the genius of the race' but by individual great geniuses, belong- ing to the race, whose imagination and insight ihave helped it for- ward, forced it to express itself and made it famous 4. Should Anglo-Welsh Literature express a Welsh attitude io life and affairs, or should it be merely a literature about Welsh things ? I feel as if there were only a very limited margin of choice of subjects for a writer who is inspired by his true demon": and that it is the demon" within him that drives him to this or that, whether Welsh or non-Welsh.