Welsh Journals

Correspondence SWANSEA CRITICISM. Dear Sir, Some of your contributors deny the existence of Anglo-Welsh culture. The term, which has such varied connotations, is an awkward one, and the thing it stands for is perhaps an awkward factor in the political and social situation; nevertheless, it cannot be ignored in any realistic view of the present situation, and I should like to congratulate the Editor of Wales on his courage and honesty in facing the fact squarely in his last editorial. By definition, Anglo-Welsh must be a hybrid entity, but is it not true that a fusion of the traditions and culture of two great nations really does exist today ? Whether its existence is desirable or not is another and entirely different matter. What, for example, of people like myself, born of an inter-marriage between a Welsh and an English parent, brought up with an emphasis perhaps on English traditions but living always in Wales, educated, first at a school which strengthened the English element, then at a University College which impressed Welsh cultural traditions upon its students ? Personally, I think of myself as Welsh, though my attempts to learn the language have not been successful as I am a poor linguist. Yet among pure-bred Welshmen, people such as I are regarded as English, though our English relations naturally consider us Welsh. As mongrels we find fierce nationalistic claims on either si de somewhat distressing. Among the brave new independent states and nations where do we come in ? Do we have to populate Monmouthshire ? Or drown ourselves in the Severn ? To pass on to the question raised in this quarter's quota." Surely a man making poetry in any language must have mastered not merely the technicalities of that language but also have absorbed a great deal of its tradition, for the words he uses have infinitely subtle and elusive connotations which are vitally important in poetry. The fact that the poet, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the writer of creative prose, can command these subtleties to evoke a response, implies that he has absorbed the culture of the nation whose language is his medium. So much for Anglo. On the other hand, many of our Welsh-bred writers who use the English medium show in their work, to a greater or less degree, a distinctive element which it is, indeed, difficult to define though easy enough to recognise, and which would appear to be the result of their Welsh heritage. This quality, which one must recognise, if one acknowledges differences of national temperament and training at all, belongs to the very personality of the poet. (Whether it owes its existence to racial heredity or, as some Marxists might suggest, to economic environment, is a question beyond the scope of this letter and irrelevant to the present issue.) The point is that if a poet is Welsh he cannot help but express his Welshness whatever the linguistic medium he uses; though I am inclined to doubt whether he can effectively increase this real element in his own nature by attempting deliberately to cultivate it. I agree with Rhys Davies that a conscious and deliberate exploitation of such distinction by the artist himself may well destroy its very existence and certainly hampers its expression; then the thing ceases to be alive and organic and becomes something like a pose or a mask-interesting in its way, but dead. Welshmen writing in English seem to fall into three groups. (i) The ad hac prose writers who simply use English as a useful medium for propaganda and exposition. (2) The Welshmen who keep the two cultures separate and who, while able to express themselves fluently in either language, keep their traditions so much apart that poets-of this class, when they write in English, paradoxically write poetry nearer to the English norm than poets- of the third group. In this second group