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'There is nowhere like Criccieth.' You don't say !-for school-maga- zine banality this takes the biscuit. Forget your 'while they sleep new day dreams speaking sea Myfanwy Thomas. and find a new vigour-to forget the pernicious influence of the inferior writing of our 'bard on a raised hearth' and hammer out a new vigour based on what is good in his work-and there is plenty of it and it is very good. 'Pale-faced Emlyn' is almost a national hero, a morbid product of SIR: It is indeed amusing to watch the fine prifardd Trefin whirling his Gorsedd sword about in almost fanatical defence of the rules of Cynghanedd. But where I personally am concerned he is really making a great deal of fuss over nothing. I thought I had made it clear at the outset that in the piece entitled 'Hatred', which I wrote many years ago, I was not at all pretending to conform strictly to the rules as pres- cribed by Dafydd ab Edmwnd, but only attempting an approximation, and that for the benefit of English readers who were unacquainted with the Welsh Cynghanedd form; give a broad idea of its essentials and pecu- liarities; try to interest them in it. As a matter of fact I deliberately trans- gressed the rules in some lines for the supreme purpose of getting the sense home. I should have thought that this was obvious to anyone other than a our all-too-conscious desire to show 'respect' and be humble (this I think defeating its own object in that you then so often do not recognise true humility in others: religion has made the Welsh pale, and an inferiority complex has made that pale-face even more self-effacing). I could go on, but no Yours sincerely, J. Idris Jones 12 Old House The Hawthorns Keele, Staffs. Mere Verbal Trickery? dotty stickler for precedence like Trefin. By strictly conforming to the rules, and showing-off in the course of it, he has succeeded only in making a meaningless emasculation of some- thing that might otherwise have stood for a poem, on part of one, with sense and sequence. The worst thing about the Rules, of course, is that they do not afford much manoeuvring space for the profundities. They allow mere words, sheer verbal trickery or sleight-of-hand, to assert too great a pre-eminence over the mind-a thing which is fatal to the greater poetry. The only cure it seems is to bury once and for all the sacred cow of Dafydd ab Edmwnd and invent a more elastic new Set of Rules for our modern requirements. Let Trefin go on enjoying himself with the verbal emendations, but let