“He is one of the few poets I know, intensely occupied with his craft... I think him to be the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English.” Dylan Thomas
Vernon Watkins was one of the outstanding Welsh poets of the twentieth century. He was also an original thinker and theorist on the art and nature of poetry.
This collection of previously unpublished work further reveals him as a wise, sensitive and perceptive critic. The edited selection of his prose writing has been sourced from his personal papers and it seeks to reflect Watkins’ central interests and includes a substantial body of work devoted to his great friend Dylan Thomas.
The book also includes critical essays on Alun Lewis; the ‘Modern Poets’: Thomas Hardy, W. B Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and Auden, amongst others; essays on ‘The Need of the Artist’, Ceri Richards, and ‘In Defence of Sound’.
Foreword by Rowan Williams
Selected and edited by Gwen Watkins and Jeff Towns